Fifteen metres of girth, and almost none of it is a trunk in the ordinary sense.
Ancient Trees in Singapore Botanic Gardens
Singapore's Botanic Gardens opened in 1859 and earned a UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2015, not for any single specimen but for grounds that have kept unusually good paperwork on the trees growing in them.
A sausage tree arrived from Honolulu on 13 May 1931 and went into the ground that October, one of dozens of tropical trials from an era when a plant's usefulness decided its future. A cannon ball tree grew from a seed the assistant director E.J.H. Corner grabbed during a rushed eight-hour stop at the botanic garden in Peradeniya, Ceylon, the same year. A baobab, moved once in 1996 and only about forty years old, already carries five metres of girth, a fraction of the age a species that can pass a thousand years usually needs for that. A giant strangler fig by Swan Lake is registered as a Burmese banyan, though a 2024 study argues it is something else entirely, propagated here from cuttings for more than 150 years. A saga tree planted in the 1880s to smother weed grass now sits in the National Heritage Board's own art collection, photographed for a 2013 work mapping the island's saga trees. Two nutmeg trees near the old Economic Garden are what is left of the spice boom that gave Orchard Road its name. All eight stand on garden ground open daily and free to enter.
All 8 stand in Singapore, which maps 18 remarkable trees in total.
The saga was brought to Singapore to fight a grass.
A ripe fruit on this tree is a grey-brown cylinder up to a metre long, hanging from a cord of a stalk, heavy enough that nobody sensible stands under one for long.
This tree flowers and fruits straight out of its own trunk.
There is a baobab in Singapore, and it is only about forty years old.
Orchard Road is named after orchards, and the crop in them was nutmeg.
You can see this tree from the Bandstand, which is odd for a tree standing inside a forest.
When Nelson Mandela came to the Singapore Botanic Gardens in 1997, the Gardens dedicated a tree to him, and they picked an unlikely one.
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