The Banyan of Tiong Bahru Park

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.