The African Butter Tree of the Healing Garden

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.