The Baobab of Melati Gate

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.