The Pink Shower Tree of The Murray

This tree spent decades standing on its own in a government car park, and it now grows up through two levels of a hotel. The building beside it went up in 1969 as Murray Building, a block of government offices on Cotton Tree Drive where several policy bureaux had their headquarters. The tree was already there. Hong Kong's Secretary for Development, who once had an office in the building, wrote after its conversion that the tree is over a hundred years old and saw the building completed. That is the only age anyone has given it, so read it as an account rather than a measurement. It is a pink and white shower tree, Cassia javanica var. indochinensis, 17 metres tall with a trunk just over a metre across at chest height. Its health, the Secretary wrote, had only been so-so. When the offices became The Murray hotel, which opened in January 2018 after four years of work, the developer took special care around it, and the car park became a forecourt with a podium above, so the tree now passes through both levels. By that account it came out of the works in leaf and flower, and it was flowering again in May 2022. The tree stands in the open area outside the hotel lobby, on the hotel's own ground. How close you can get, and at what hours, is the hotel's call. The Peak Tram's lower terminus on Garden Road is next door.