Ancient Trees in Fort Canning Park

A rain tree spreads its canopy directly above the public stairway that carries walkers out onto Hill Street, so most people pass beneath it without looking up. A Madras thorn beside the Service Reservoir is the largest of its species on Singapore's whole heritage register, its girth measured twice, eleven years apart, and grown wider both times. A tamalan on Fort Green is one of the last survivors of an ornamental planting scheme laid out across the hill in the early 1900s, when the old fort grounds became a colonial pleasure garden; NParks' own register notes that few of its neighbours from that planting are still alive. A terap nasi grows beside the hill's 14th Century Walk of History with plank buttresses broad enough to make its age feel physical rather than just recorded. And an earpod tree, named in both English and Spanish for seed pods coiled like a human ear, stands between the old fort wall and the hotel that now shares the hill with it. All five are NParks-registered heritage trees, free to see, on park ground open around the clock.