The Burmese Banyan of Swan Lake

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.