Singapore gazettes its Heritage Trees by law: a girth over five metres and a story worth keeping gets a tree lightning protection, an English information panel and legal protection from felling. Ten of them are here. Five stand within a few hundred metres of each other on Fort Canning, the hill that held the island's first prison and its first botanical experiments, which makes that the walk. The rest are scattered: a bodhi tree on Pearl's Hill, a banyan in Tiong Bahru that reached a 22.8 metre girth in under sixty years, and one reachable only by boat.
0 of 34 visited in Singapore
Photo: ZKang123 (CC BY 4.0)
1
The Tembusu of Lawn E
Tembusu (Cyrtophyllum fragrans) · 200+ years · Tanglin, Singapore Botanic Gardens
This tree was already old when the Singapore Botanic Gardens opened around it in 1859. NParks estimates it at more than 200 years, based on growth patterns compared with other tembusu of known age, which makes it a survivor of whatever forest stood on this ground before the Gardens were laid out. Its most distinctive feature is a single low branch that grows out almost parallel to the ground before curling upward, a shape unusual enough that illustrator Eng Siak Loy chose this exact tree, and this exact limb, to draw on the reverse of Singapore's five-dollar note. It is the only tree ever to appear on a Singapore banknote. Tembusu wood is prized separately from the tree's fame: dense and highly resistant to termites, it has long been used in Malay boat-building and furniture, and the timber's hardness even became a figure of speech in Malay for a person with an unyielding heart. The tree's creamy-white flowers open in clusters and turn yellow with age, most fragrant in the late evening, when they once would have drawn Malayan flying foxes to feed on the fruit that follows. It stands in the free section of the Gardens, an easy walk from the Tanglin Gate, on open lawn rather than behind any barrier, close enough to Swan Lake that most visitors photograph the water first and only notice the tree, and the branch on their banknote, on the way back.
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Photo: Wzhkevin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Fort Canning Rain Tree
Rain Tree (Samanea saman) · over 100 years (planting date undocumented) · Fort Canning, Singapore
This rain tree spreads its umbrella-shaped canopy directly over a public stairway that carries walkers out of Fort Canning Park onto Hill Street, so almost everyone who takes those steps passes under it whether they notice or not. Rain trees only arrived in Singapore in 1876, imported from tropical America and planted heavily through the colonial coffee and nutmeg plantations that once covered much of the island, and this specimen's own planting date was never recorded, though its 4.93 metre girth points to a tree well over a century old. Its most reliable feature is not size but timing: every evening, roughly ninety minutes before sunset, its paired leaflets fold shut, and they do the same on overcast days, a light-sensitive reflex that gave the species both its English name and its Malay one, Pukul Lima, five o'clock. Fort Canning Hill itself was the seat of the ancient Kingdom of Singapura before it became a British fort and then a public park, so a tree standing sentinel over one of its main entrances is, in a small way, guarding ground with a longer history than the tree itself. Clusters of pink-and-white flowers appear through the year without a single dramatic peak, and the pods that follow ripen dark and fleshy, adding to the tree's already broad, low silhouette.
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Photo: Wzhkevin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Fort Canning Madras Thorn
Madras Thorn (Pithecellobium dulce) · age undocumented, girth grew from 7.4m to 8.5m since 2001 · Fort Canning, Singapore
NParks records this as the largest Madras thorn on Singapore's heritage register, an 8.5 metre girth today, up from 7.4 metres when it was first measured for the scheme in 2001. The species arrived in the region centuries ago with Portuguese and Spanish traders from tropical America, and by the mid-1900s it lined roadsides and housing estates across Singapore as a shade tree, until a caterpillar infestation through the 1970s got it stripped from most public planting. This one, tucked beside Fort Canning's old Service Reservoir rather than out on a street, survived that cull. Its crown is low, spreading and unusually bushy for a tree this size, shaggy with bird's nest ferns and other epiphytes that have colonized its branches over the decades, giving it a wilder look than its more manicured heritage-tree neighbours. Short, sharp thorns guard the base of each leaf, the source of both its common name and part of the Greek genus name, which references the fruit's resemblance to a monkey's earring. Those fruits split into coiled, rose-red pods each spring, exposing a sweet white pulp around glossy black seeds that draws yellow-vented bulbuls and Oriental magpie robins to disperse them, and the same pulp is eaten by people elsewhere in its native range as a sour-sweet snack or juice.
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4
The Fort Canning Tamalan
Tamalan / Burmese Rosewood (Dalbergia oliveri) · likely 100+ years (planting era documented, exact date not) · Fort Canning, Singapore
This tamalan is one of the last survivors of an ornamental planting scheme that once covered much of Fort Canning Hill in the early 1900s, when the old fort grounds were being turned into a colonial pleasure garden. NParks' own register notes that few of the tamalan planted here in that era still line the hill's paths, which makes this specimen, standing at Fort Green, a rare direct witness to that specific phase of the park's history rather than a later replacement. The species is native to Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, where it can reach 20 to 30 metres, and it was brought to Singapore purely for its looks: a crown of delicate, feathery foliage carried on branches that spread wide and low, with flower buds that open lilac, shift to pink, and fade to white as they age. Its wood connects it to a more famous family. Dalbergia is the genus behind Brazilian rosewood and African blackwood, both prized and now heavily restricted timbers, and while this tree has never been harvested, its relatives explain why the genus carries the weight it does among furniture makers and luthiers. At 5.48 metres in girth and just under 15 metres tall, it is modest next to some of Fort Canning's other heritage trees, but it is one of the few left standing from a planting era the park's own records otherwise struggle to document.
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5
The Terap Nasi of the 14th Century Walk
Terap Nasi (Artocarpus elasticus) · age undocumented, girth grew from 4.1m to 5.68m since 2001 · Fort Canning, Singapore
This terap grows beside Fort Canning's 14th Century Walk of History, a path named for the hill's role as the seat of the ancient Kingdom of Singapura, and it carries plank buttresses at its base broad enough to make the connection to old ground feel physical rather than just historical. Its girth has grown from 4.1 metres, when NParks first endorsed it as a heritage tree in 2001, to 5.68 metres today, real if unspectacular proof of two and a half decades of recorded growth, though nothing in the register dates its planting itself. Botanist John Henry Corner, assistant director of the Botanic Gardens through the 1930s and 40s, documented Fort Canning's terap specimens in his standard reference Wayside Trees of Malaya, giving this small grove a paper trail most street trees never get. In the wild the species can reach 45 to 65 metres; Singapore's cultivated specimens stay far smaller, but the fruit does not: each one grows to roughly 18 centimetres, ripening from cream to brown and smelling notoriously strong when cut open, guarding a sweet white pulp locals have described as tasting like tangy marshmallow. The tree's tough, fibrous inner bark was historically stripped and worked into cordage, coarse cloth and basket lining across the region, a practical use that outlived the kingdom the walking path beside it is named for.
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6
The Kapok Tree of Seah Im Road
Kapok (Ceiba pentandra) · age undocumented · Mount Faber, Singapore
At 11.55 metres in girth, this is one of the largest-trunked trees on Singapore's entire heritage register, rising 34.6 metres from the edge of an ordinary public car park at the foot of Mount Faber. Kapok is deciduous, unusual for a tropical tree, dropping its leaves entirely before flowering, and its cream-coloured blooms open at night with a milky scent that draws bats to pollinate them, an entirely different visiting crowd than the tree gets by day. The seed pods that follow split to release a fine, water-resistant white fiber once used to stuff life jackets and mattresses worldwide, the reason the tree ended up as Puerto Rico's national tree despite originating, like this one's ancestors, in tropical America. What makes this particular specimen worth the detour is what stands twenty metres behind it in the undergrowth: a brick-entranced wartime bunker, its tunnel about 2.5 metres tall inside with small ventilation holes along the walls, largely forgotten until vegetation was cleared enough to rediscover it. Local historians believe it was built shortly before the Second World War, though its exact use, whether to hold prisoners of war or simply to store equipment and ammunition, has never been confirmed. The kapok tree is the only obvious marker for anyone trying to find it.
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7
The Mangrove Apples of Chek Jawa
Mangrove Apple / Perepat (Sonneratia alba) · age undocumented · Pulau Ubin
These two mangrove apples are, according to NParks' own register, the only mangrove trees among Singapore's 251 heritage trees, standing together beside the old House No. 1 at Chek Jawa, on the far side of Pulau Ubin from the mainland. Getting there already takes effort: a bumboat from Changi Point to Ubin, then a walk or bike ride to the free boardwalk that lets visitors cross the wetland without touching the mud beneath it. The trees themselves spend part of every day partly submerged, rising and falling with the tide in a stretch of shoreline built almost entirely on salt tolerance. Around their bases, pneumatophores, root structures that poke straight up through the mud like a field of woody snorkels, let the trees pull in oxygen from air rather than the waterlogged, anoxic soil their main roots sit in. To manage the salt that soil carries, they concentrate it in their oldest leaves and simply shed them, a slow-motion filtering system with no equivalent among ordinary garden trees. Chek Jawa itself very nearly does not exist as a public reserve at all. It was slated for land reclamation in 2001 until a citizen-led biodiversity survey and public campaign got the plan shelved, meaning this pair of trees, unremarkable in age but singular in the register, sits inside a wetland Singapore almost paved over entirely.
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8
The Bodhi Tree of Pearl's Hill
Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · not documented · Outram, Singapore
Singapore's first prison stood on this hill, and so did its first hospital for the poor. The Bodhi tree at the top of Pearl's Hill City Park carries 6.34 metres of girth and 16.9 metres of height on NParks' heritage register, and it grows over ground that held both, which is a fair trade. The hill takes its name from Captain James Pearl, who commanded the Indiana, the ship that brought Raffles to Singapore in 1819. He liked the view enough to buy the hill and plant it with pepper. Tan Tock Seng's hospital for destitute Chinese labourers opened on its slope in the 1840s and the colonial gaol followed, both long since buried under the reservoir and the police blocks that took their place. Ficus religiosa is the species the Buddha is traditionally said to have sat beneath, and it is sacred to Buddhists and Hindus alike. The leaves are the giveaway: heart-shaped, drawn out into a long tail that sheds monsoon rain and sets the whole crown trembling in almost no wind. This is not the Bodhi tree most people in Singapore mean. That one grows at the Jin Long Si Temple and has had its own long public fight over the land around it. This is a different individual on a different hill, and it draws no crowd at all. NParks records no planting date, so its age is unknown.
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9
The Banyan of Tiong Bahru Park
Indian Banyan (Ficus benghalensis) · under 60 years (planted after the park opened in 1967) · Tiong Bahru, Singapore
A girth of 22.8 metres usually takes a tree several centuries. This one managed it in under sixty years. Tiong Bahru Park was developed in 1967 and NParks' own register states plainly that the banyan was planted after that, which makes it younger than the flats around it and still one of the widest trees on Singapore's heritage list. The trick is in how a banyan is put together. Ficus benghalensis drops aerial roots from its branches; they reach the ground, thicken into trunks of their own, then fuse with each other and with the original stem into a single braided mass that a tape measure reads as one enormous trunk. A banyan does not so much grow fat as recruit. Measured at the standard 1.3 metres above the ground, those 22.8 metres are really a committee. So the thing to go and look at here is not age. It is speed, and the odd architecture that produces it: a tree 18.4 metres tall occupying its patch of park like something with four times its lifespan behind it, props still coming down through the canopy in various stages of becoming trunks. In Hindu tradition the species carries its own weight, the roots read as Brahma's, the trunk as Vishnu's, the branches as Shankar's. Older banyans elsewhere in the Tiong Bahru area have been called a hundred years and more. This one, by its own record, is not among them.
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10
The Earpod Tree of Fort Canning
Earpod Tree (Enterolobium cyclocarpum) · not documented · Fort Canning, Singapore
The seed pods explain the name: dark, flat, coiled into a near-perfect circle and close enough to a human ear that the tree is called after one in both Spanish and English. In Costa Rica, where the same species is the national tree, those pods are a roadside fixture. The earpod at Fort Canning has been on Singapore's heritage register since 2001, with 5.94 metres of girth and 17.9 metres of height, standing on the path behind the Fort Wall. It came from the tropical dry forests running from Mexico down to Venezuela, where it is one of the largest trees of that habitat, reaching 40 metres with a trunk three metres through, and where old specimens push surface roots out far enough to lift nearby paving. It arrived here as an ornamental and is now the first stop on NParks' own walking trail of the hill's heritage trees, which puts four more within a few hundred metres of it. One thing is unresolved and worth knowing before you go. Both the register and NParks' current Fort Canning trail guide describe this tree standing. A 2025 travel account describes an earpod tree somewhere in the same park that came down in a 2014 storm and kept growing on its side, its trunk now carrying orchids and ferns. Nobody has confirmed whether that is this tree or another one. If you find it lying down, it is alive, and it is still worth the walk.
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11
The Sausage Tree of the Sundial Garden
Sausage Tree (Kigelia africana) · about 95 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
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. That is the whole species in one glance, and it is where the name comes from. The Gardens kept the paperwork for this particular tree. It arrived from Honolulu on 13 May 1931 and went into the ground on 19 October the same year, one of the tropical species being trialled here for economic and medicinal value, in an era when whether a plant was useful decided whether it earned a place. It has held its patch of lawn beside the Sundial Garden ever since. In its native Africa the fruit is both useful and dangerous. Raw it is poisonous. Processed it goes into herbal remedies and fermented drinks, and in several communities a fruit is buried in place of a body when there is no body to bury. The flowers that come before it are deep maroon, smell of nothing anyone would choose, and open at night for bats rather than bees. Ninety-five years in, though, the sausages are the point. Once set they hang for months, which makes this one of the few trees on this list with something to show whichever week you turn up.
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12
The Baobab of Melati Gate
Baobab (Adansonia digitata) · about 40 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
There is a baobab in Singapore, and it is only about forty years old. Everything worth knowing about it follows from those two facts. The species belongs to dry African savannah, where it survives months without rain by storing water in a swollen trunk; Singapore delivers rain most weeks and grows very few baobabs from seed. This is thought to be one of the handful that were. NParks put it at close to thirty years old when it was endorsed as a heritage tree in 2016, which makes it around forty now. For a species that can pass a thousand years, that is a child, and it already carries five metres of girth. Baobab trunks swell out of all proportion to their height as they age, so a young one looks like a fat grey bottle with twigs on top. This is exactly that. It has moved once. In June 1996 it was lifted from elsewhere in the Gardens and replanted here beside Melati Gate on the Cluny Park Road side, a long way from the busier lawns, which is why most visitors never meet it. Its flowers are worth knowing about even if you will not see them: large, white, hanging upside down, opening after dark for bats to pollinate, and finished inside a day.
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13
The Cannon Ball Tree of the Ginger Garden
Cannon Ball Tree (Couroupita guianensis) · about 95 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
This tree flowers and fruits straight out of its own trunk. Ropes of waxy pink and cream flowers erupt from the bark, and behind them hang the fruit it is named for, brown spheres the size of cannon balls that crack open on the ground and smell appalling for days afterwards. It grew from seed collected in a hurry. In 1931 E.J.H. Corner, then an assistant director of the Botanic Gardens, was sailing back from home leave in England when his ship called at Colombo. He had eight hours before it left again, spent them getting up to the botanic garden at Peradeniya near Kandy, and came back aboard with cannon ball seed. This tree was planted from it that year, behind the waterfall at the edge of the Ginger Garden. The flowers make no nectar, and the pollen in the ring at their centre is sterile. Carpenter bees come for that sterile pollen anyway and collect the fertile kind on their backs on the way in, which is the arrangement the entire species runs on. Two degrees off the equator there is no season to wait for; it flowers and fruits more or less continuously. Half a dozen more heritage trees stand within about five hundred metres, which makes this the one stretch of this list you can walk rather than travel between.
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14
The Nutmegs of the Economic Garden
Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Orchard Road is named after orchards, and the crop in them was nutmeg. Singapore grew it hard through the 1840s until disease went through the plantations in the 1860s and took the industry with it. These two trees are not survivors of that boom. They are the closest thing to it still growing in the city. They stand a few metres apart in the Central Core, on the ground of the Gardens' Economic Garden, laid out in 1879 to work out which tropical crops could be made to pay here. Nutmeg was already the answer that had failed, kept on as a specimen, and this pair are among the last of those crop plants left standing. The register lists them separately. A visitor sees one thing: two trunks a little over a metre round each, neither the sort of bulk that stops anyone in their tracks. What they do have is fruit. Nutmeg trees are either male or female, and both of these are female. The fruit is a yellow, apricot-shaped thing that splits to show a scarlet lace cage wrapped around a single dark seed. The cage is mace. The seed is nutmeg. One tree, two spices, priced separately for centuries. Nobody recorded when either of them went in. If you know, tell us.
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15
The Burmese Banyan of Swan Lake
Burmese Banyan (Ficus kurzii) · over 150 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Fifteen metres of girth, and almost none of it is a trunk in the ordinary sense. This is a strangler fig, and what a tape measure reads at chest height is a fused colonnade of pillar roots dropped from the branches over a century and more, thickened where they hit the ground and grown together since. It carries that mass 22 metres up, on the edge of Swan Lake. NParks will not date it. The register says only that it is thought to be as old as the Gardens themselves, which opened in 1859, and that is a tradition rather than a record. What is firmer than the tradition: the tree turns up in old paintings of the Gardens, and Herbarium staff have recalled playing around it as children in the 1930s, so it was already a landmark before the war. Even its name is unsettled. It is registered as Ficus kurzii, the Burmese banyan, but a fig specialist writing in 2024 points out that true wild kurzii does not grow this far south down the Malay Peninsula, and argues this tree is more likely a hybrid with Ficus benjamina, propagated here from cuttings for more than 150 years. So: one of the largest things growing in the Gardens, and still an open question as to what it actually is.
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The Saga Tree of the Tanglin Entrance
Saga (Adenanthera pavonina) · over 125 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
The saga was brought to Singapore to fight a grass. Between 1883 and 1885 the Gardens' superintendent Nathaniel Cantley planted it as an experiment in smothering lalang, the coarse weed grass that takes any cleared ground here within weeks. It worked well enough that the director Henry Ridley later used saga to shade the Gardens' nutmeg, and by the 1970s and 80s it had become a standard Singapore roadside tree. This one grows a few minutes inside the Tanglin entrance, near the Frangipani Garden. Its age comes out of a filing cabinet rather than off a tape. The earliest herbarium specimen cut from this individual tree is dated 1900, which is why the register says it must be well over a century old, putting it past 126 years now. Its measurements are less settled. NParks records a girth of 5.32 metres and a height of 13.1 metres; the National Heritage Board's own entry gives 4.8 metres and 24 metres. The height gap is far too wide to split, so treat both as claims and neither as final. What nobody disputes is the seeds, hard scarlet discs that children pocket and collectors hunt; one collector has mapped 57 saga trees across the island. This tree also sits in a national art collection, photographed by Robert Zhao Renhui for his 2013 work mapping exactly those trees.
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17
The Jelutong of Lawn S
Jelutong (Dyera costulata) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
You can see this tree from the Bandstand, which is odd for a tree standing inside a forest. The jelutong is an emergent: it does not stop at the canopy but pushes its crown out above it, and at 29 metres this one clears everything around it. What is around it matters as much as the tree. It grows on Lawn S, inside the Gardens' patch of primary rainforest, one of only two fragments of Singapore's original forest left anywhere on the island. The species is native here, so this is a tree standing in something close to the vegetation it evolved in, in the middle of a city that has built over almost all of it. Its sap made chewing gum. Gutta jelutong was tapped across Malaya as a base for the stuff, and the pale, soft timber went into pencils, which is a strange double career for a tree in a country that banned the sale of chewing gum in 1992. Nobody has dated it. The register offers no estimate at all, only four metres of girth and that height, and for once the height is the more interesting number: a native tree, in native forest, tall enough to be picked out from a lawn several hundred metres away. If anyone has measured or dated this one, we would like to hear it.
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The Mandela Tree of Orchid Plaza
Giant Cola (Cola gigantea) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
When Nelson Mandela came to the Singapore Botanic Gardens in 1997, the Gardens dedicated a tree to him, and they picked an unlikely one. The giant cola is West African, unlike anything else growing around Orchid Plaza, and it has stood there with his name attached ever since. An orchid was named for the same visit, which is the more Singaporean gesture. The tree is the one you can walk up to. Cola gigantea belongs to the genus behind the original cola drinks. Its nuts are bitter and loaded with caffeine, chewed across West Africa as a stimulant and offered to guests as a matter of courtesy, and almost every part of the tree has a use in traditional medicine: bark for swellings and pain, other parts against fever, asthma and whooping cough. Laboratory work on its leaf extracts has since taken an interest in the anti-inflammatory half of that reputation. It is not a giant here. Three and a half metres of girth and fifteen metres of height is respectable rather than startling, and it only joined the heritage register in 2014, seventeen years after the dedication. Nobody recorded when it was planted. A dedication is not a planting, so its age is genuinely unknown, and no record of one has turned up.
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19
The African Butter Tree of the Healing Garden
African Butter Tree (Pentadesma butyracea) · roughly 130 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
The seeds of this tree are roughly forty percent fat, and West Africa presses them for butter. That is what brought it to Singapore. In 1897 the Botanic Gardens had it sent from Sierra Leone and planted in the Economic Garden, the plot where the colony tested which tropical crops could be made to pay. Pentadesma butyracea grows wild from Guinea to Cameroon and nowhere in Southeast Asia. The oil never became a business here, and the experiment settled into being a specimen instead.
NParks calls this tree likely a remnant of that original introduction and says it has stood on this spot for more than a century. That word likely is why its age sits as a band, roughly 110 to 140 years, rather than a date. The measurements are firmer: 3.2 metres round in 2003, 3.6 metres now, and 18 metres of crown over the Healing Garden.
A survey of Southeast Asian plant resources records the species growing successfully in Singapore by about 1900, which confirms the experiment took even though the trade never did.
The fruit is the size of a fist, ten to twelve centimetres, with a rind that takes a knife and a yellow greasy juice inside. The seeds within are the part anyone wanted. It now stands in the Healing Garden behind Block 5, doing nothing commercial at all.
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20
The Teak of the Botany Centre
Teak (Tectona grandis) · about 140 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Teak needs a dry season, and Singapore has never had one. NParks says so on this tree's own record: the species struggles in a climate without an annual drought. This one dates from 1884 by NParks' own dating, which puts it at about 140 years, and it has spent all of them growing in conditions its species is not built for. Girth 2.9 metres, height 20.6 metres.
Tectona grandis belongs to the monsoon forests of Myanmar, Thailand, India and Indochina, where it drops its leaves through the dry months. Singapore does not supply them. The tree stands instead along Office Ring Road beside the Botany Centre, which is about as far from a monsoon forest as a teak is likely to get.
Its timber is the reason anyone knows the word. Teak is loaded with natural oils that see off termites and shrug off water, which is why it has decked ships for centuries and why teak furniture tends to outlive the people who buy it. Plantations across the tropics exist for that one property.
This one was never cut. It has stood since 1884 and the only thing anybody has ever taken from it is a measurement. For a species valued almost entirely by the cubic metre, that counts as an unusual career.
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21
The Nemesu of the Rainforest
Nemesu (Rubroshorea pauciflora) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Forty-four and a half metres is roughly a fourteen-storey building, and that is the height of this tree, standing in the middle of Singapore. The nemesu is an emergent dipterocarp, built to push a straight bole clear of everything around it, and the species can carry that trunk to sixty metres. This one is six metres round at chest height, thick even by the standards of the city's heritage register.
It is also an endangered species, and this tree did not arrive in a pot. It stands inside the six hectares of surviving rainforest held within the Singapore Botanic Gardens, ground the Gardens grew around rather than laid out. UNESCO listed the Gardens as a World Heritage Site in 2015.
You do not walk up to it. NParks says it can be seen from a nearby footpath and is easily viewed from Lower Ring Road. The rainforest patch is not somewhere to wander into, and the tree is big enough that this hardly matters. Look for scaly bark and the plank buttresses spreading from its base.
The species has a road named after it across town, Nemesu Avenue by Lower Peirce Reservoir. Nobody has published this tree's age, and dipterocarp growth varies too much from site to site to work one out from the girth. If anyone has a figure, we would like it.
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Photo: Andy Mabbett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Mengkulang of the Gardens' Jungle
Mengkulang (Heritiera elata) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
In 1908 Henry Ridley described a species new to science, and the material came off this tree. Heritiera elata is pinned to it: that is what a type specimen is, the individual the name itself refers back to. Ridley was the Botanic Gardens' first Director, and his note on these trees reads like a man who already had a favourite. There are two or three of these fine trees in the Gardens' Jungle, he wrote. The finest is a conspicuous object by the plant sheds.
The Gardens' Jungle is still there, a patch of remnant rainforest held inside the Botanic Gardens, and it has produced a run of type specimens over the years. A 2022 paper from the National University of Singapore, cataloguing the plants first described from Singapore ground, lists this species among them.
The trunk is the giveaway. Its plank buttresses fold vertically, in pleats running up from the base, a feature unique to the species. Four and a half metres round, twenty-six metres tall, standing along Lower Ring Road near the Bandstand.
Its age is genuinely unknown. NParks says it is probably older than the Gardens, which were laid out in 1859, but that is an impression rather than a measurement, and nobody has put a number on it. If you know better, tell us.
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23
The Temak of Main Gate Road
Temak (Anthoshorea roxburghii) · roughly 55 to 60 years · Singapore Botanic Gardens
This tree flowered and fruited three times between 1983 and 1986, then went quiet for a quarter of a century before doing it three times again between 2012 and 2014. Dipterocarps mast on a clock nobody has fully worked out, and the Temak is a dipterocarp a long way from home: its range runs from India through mainland Southeast Asia to the northern end of Peninsular Malaysia, and it does not grow wild in Singapore at all.
Heritage Trees here are usually gazetted once they pass five metres in girth. This one measures 3.46 metres and was gazetted anyway, in 2013, which is what happens when the species itself is rare enough that size stops being the argument. It stands 27.2 metres over Main Gate Road, about five minutes inside the Tanglin Entrance.
NParks thinks it went into the ground in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and that it is probably one of the dipterocarps planted along this road by Wong Yew Kwan, the country's first Commissioner of Parks and Recreation. The hedging is theirs and worth keeping: nobody wrote the planting down. A tree with a GPS fix, a height and a girth measured to the centimetre still has an age given as a rough decade, which is the ordinary condition of most trees in a city that grew faster than its paperwork.
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24
The Snake Tree of Main Gate Road
Snake Tree (Stereospermum fimbriatum) · 89 years (planted 5 November 1937) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
This tree has a birthday. It was planted on 5 November 1937, a date recorded for the specimen itself rather than for the road or the garden around it, which makes it one of the few large trees in the Singapore Botanic Gardens whose age is a fact rather than an estimate.
It was four years old when Singapore fell in February 1942, and it has stood on Main Gate Road, opposite the Marsh Garden, through everything since. It is 30.6 metres tall now, with a girth of 4.6 metres.
The name is about the fruit. Snake Trees carry long, splitting seed pods that hang down from the branches and look convincingly like something that could drop on you. The flowers are the better show and much harder to catch: white with a pink flush, they open in the evening and are on the ground before dawn, so anyone arriving at a civilised hour sees the previous night's flowering scattered across the path rather than the tree in bloom. Come at dusk if you want the actual thing.
The species belongs to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia and was brought here. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2013, seventy-six years after somebody dug the hole and wrote down the date.
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25
The West Indian Locust Tree of Corner House
West Indian Locust Tree (Hymenaea courbaril) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
The flowers smell of sour milk and the pods stink when you bruise them, which does a poor job of advertising the sweet, edible pulp inside those pods. Children across the tree's home range worked it out anyway, and have been eating it for as long as anyone has written about the species.
This one stands 32.8 metres over the lawn beside Corner House, with a girth of 3.63 metres and smooth pinkish-brown bark that cracks open where the big branches leave the trunk. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2014. The West Indian Locust is an American tree, from the Caribbean and tropical South America, grown for a hard timber and for copal, the resin it bleeds, which went into varnish for centuries before synthetics took that trade away.
The species reached Singapore in 1875. That is the date the plant arrived in the country, not the date this particular tree went into the ground, and the two are not the same claim: nobody recorded when this specimen was planted, and the register does not pretend otherwise. So it goes on the map with a height, a girth and a coordinate, and no age at all. If you have seen a planting record, an old photograph or a garden plan that fixes it, tell us and we will put the number on.
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The Chengal Pasir of Cluny Park Way
Thai Ironwood (Hopea odorata) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Thirty-five and a half metres of tree on a trunk 2.6 metres round. The Chengal Pasir grows almost straight up and spends nothing on width, which is why Singapore planted so many of them along its roads, and why its timber has a reputation for outlasting teak.
Several grow on the same stretch of lawn along Cluny Park Way. This is the largest of them and, by the heritage register's account, the biggest of its species anywhere in the Botanic Gardens. It was gazetted in 2015 and dedicated to the LU Foundation, one of the donors to the Garden City Fund.
The species has been in the Gardens' books for over a century: J.W. Anderson listed Hopea odorata in his Index of Plants in 1912. That records the species growing here, not this tree being planted, and no date exists for the individual, so its age is properly unknown rather than merely vague. If you know when it went in, tell us.
In the wild, Hopea odorata is in retreat across a range running from Bangladesh and Myanmar through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the top of Peninsular Malaysia. There is something odd about standing in front of a threatened forest tree that this city plants along its ordinary streets.
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The Kempas of Corner House
Kempas (Koompassia malaccensis) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
Kempas trees grow plank buttresses up to six metres tall, walls of root that hold a very tall trunk upright in swamp ground that gives nothing to grip. This one runs to 38.6 metres behind Corner House, on a girth of 4.5 metres, and the heritage register makes a point of saying the public can walk right up to it.
The species is endangered and it is local. Koompassia malaccensis belongs to the lowland freshwater peat-swamp forests that once covered a good deal of this island and now barely survive on it, so a Kempas of this size inside a city is a reminder of the forest type Singapore built over rather than a specimen brought in from somewhere else.
The name travelled in the unusual direction. Kempas is the Malay word; botanists Latinised it into Koompassia and handed it back as the genus, adding malaccensis for Malacca. There is a Kempas Road in Bendemeer named after the tree.
The Gardens hold a second gazetted Kempas near the Fernery, about half a kilometre away. This is the other one, behind Corner House by the EJH Corner House gate, gazetted in 2015 and dedicated to the Mingxin Foundation.
Nobody has dated it. The girth is on record, the planting is not. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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Photo: Yaron Budowski (CC BY)
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The Johor Fig of the Rainforest
Johor Fig (Ficus kerkhovenii) · Singapore Botanic Gardens
The tape goes fourteen metres around this fig, and almost none of what it measures is trunk. Johor Figs begin as stranglers, germinating high in the crown of another tree and letting roots down around it until the host is wrapped, shaded and dead. What you reach from the rainforest boardwalk is the result: a fused column of prop roots and stems that grew as scaffolding around something else and stayed on as the structure.
It is 26.6 metres tall, short for a species that can pass 45, and it grows in the six-hectare patch of rainforest inside the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Ficus kerkhovenii is critically endangered in Singapore, and the handful of places where one still reaches this size can be listed on one hand. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2012.
The name is Dutch colonial botany. The epithet honours E.J. Kerkhoven, the Dutch botanist who died in 1905, and the common name points across the strait to Johor.
There is no age on it, and a strangler does not really have a clean one to give. It started as a seed dropped by a bird or a bat into someone else's branches, and the tree that carried it through its first decades is long gone.
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The Penaga Laut of the Botany Centre
Penaga Laut / Alexandrian Laurel (Calophyllum inophyllum) · more than 100 years · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
The Botany Centre at the Singapore Botanic Gardens was built around this tree on purpose, its floor plan bent to leave it standing exactly where it already grew. NParks lists it a Heritage Tree, girth 6.9 metres, native to Singapore's coastline and now endangered in the wild here, more than a hundred years old by nobody's precise count.
Penaga laut, or Alexandrian laurel, keeps a short thick trunk and a wide crown, and this one's bark has fissured dark brown with age. Bird's Nest Ferns and a large Tiger Orchid grow directly on its branches, and Oriental Pied Hornbills have been seen picking at climbing figs on the trunk, an ordinary reminder that one old tree can carry a small ecosystem of its own.
It stands on Level 1 of the Botany Centre, opposite the auditorium, free to see any day the Gardens are open, and easy to find precisely because the building itself was designed around it.
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The Kapur of Lawn E
Kapur (Dryobalanops aromatica) · planted July 1942, about 84 years · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
This kapur was planted in July 1942, mid-occupation Singapore, from seed the botanist E.J.H. Corner collected on Malaya's east coast. Corner later described the species in his own book, Wayside Trees of Malaya, forming nearly pure stands there and reaching over 200 feet, a scale that decades of logging have since made rare anywhere.
Eighty-some years on, this one stands about 26 metres tall with a trunk three metres round. Crush a fallen leaf at its base and the resin smell that gave the wood its old use in flooring and decking is still there, sharp enough to notice without looking for it.
It is one of three kapur NParks now tracks in the Gardens, this one standing near Swan Lake and Main Gate Road, close enough to the Mountain Teak heritage tree on the same lawn to see both in one stop rather than two separate trips.
None of the three carries a public name beyond its species, which is common enough among the Gardens' heritage trees: the register protects them by measurement and history rather than by story alone.
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The Mountain Teak of Lawn B
Willowleaf Podocarp (Podocarpus neriifolius) · not documented · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
Singapore's Botanic Gardens once held a serious conifer collection where this mountain teak now stands, planted somewhere in the decades after Superintendent N. Cantley's first plant list of 1882. NParks is honest about what that record can and cannot prove: the list survives, but with no way to match its entries to specific trees still standing today, so nobody can say with any confidence that this particular tree goes back that far.
What is measured is a trunk 3.49 metres round, taken low at half a metre up, and a crown 16.4 metres high. Mountain teak, or jati bukit, is a podocarp rather than a true teak, one of the conifer family's few tropical members, and this is a rare mature specimen of it standing in a city garden rather than a forest.
It stands on Lawn B near Main Gate Road, by Swan Lake, close enough to its Botanic Gardens neighbours to fold into the same walk. If you know how old it actually is, tell us.
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The Senegal Mahogany of Swan Lake
African Mahogany (Khaya senegalensis) · planted 2 November 1980, about 46 years · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, planted this Senegal mahogany himself on 2 November 1980, for what was then Tree Planting Day, a young sapling at the time and nothing like the tree it has become. Forty-six years on it has grown to 5.7 metres round and 25 metres tall beside Swan Lake.
The species comes from a band of tropical West Africa stretching to Uganda, nothing like Singapore's own flora, and it was planted along the island's streets through the 1980s for how fast it grew and how well it took the dry season. It has since become scarce back home, worked hard for its timber, which is a large part of why West African governments now restrict its export.
It stands beside Swan Lake on Main Gate Road, an easy add to the same stretch of the Botanic Gardens that already holds the Tembusu on the five-dollar note and several of the Gardens' other heritage trees.
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The Marsh Pulai of Lawn H
Marsh Pulai (Alstonia pneumatophora) · in excess of 160 years, perhaps much older · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
Nobody planted this tree. The Botanic Gardens' own record calls it a survivor of the swamp forest that stood on this ground before the Gardens were founded in 1859, and it names no planting because there genuinely was none to name.
NParks puts it at more than 160 years old, perhaps much older, on a trunk six metres round and a pagoda-shaped crown reaching nearly 32 metres. Marsh pulai is critically endangered in the wild in Singapore now, down to an estimated 15 specimens left across the island's two nature reserves. In swampy ground the species usually grows pneumatophores, upright breathing roots that poke through the mud; this one does not, because the Gardens' soil here drains too well for it to need them.
It stands on Lawn H, beside a much younger conifer, the Jamuju, planted in 1956, close enough to make one stop of both and compare a remnant of the old forest against a tree the Gardens grew themselves.
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The Jamuju of Lawn H
Jamuju (Dacrycarpus imbricatus) · planted 30 January 1956, about 70 years · Tanglin Core, Singapore Botanic Gardens
This jamuju went into the ground on 30 January 1956, one of the last survivors of a conifer collection that once filled much of what is now the Tanglin Core of the Botanic Gardens. Seventy years on it stands nearly 19 metres tall, its trunk 2.6 metres round.
Dacrycarpus imbricatus is a tropical conifer, native across a band from southern China through Southeast Asia to the Pacific islands, in forest that is disappearing through much of that range. Its wood has gone into construction and furniture over the decades, its resin burned as fuel where it grows wild.
It stands on Lawn H beside the much older, unplanted Marsh Pulai, a fair comparison of a tree the Gardens grew deliberately from a sapling against one that was already standing on this ground before the Gardens themselves existed.
Neither tree needed replanting or replacement in the decades since, which on a lawn this close to the Gardens' main paths is its own quiet proof of how well both have been looked after.
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