The Cannon Ball Tree of the Ginger Garden

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.