The Fort Canning Madras Thorn

NParks records this as the largest Madras thorn on Singapore's heritage register, an 8.5 metre girth today, up from 7.4 metres when it was first measured for the scheme in 2001. The species arrived in the region centuries ago with Portuguese and Spanish traders from tropical America, and by the mid-1900s it lined roadsides and housing estates across Singapore as a shade tree, until a caterpillar infestation through the 1970s got it stripped from most public planting. This one, tucked beside Fort Canning's old Service Reservoir rather than out on a street, survived that cull. Its crown is low, spreading and unusually bushy for a tree this size, shaggy with bird's nest ferns and other epiphytes that have colonized its branches over the decades, giving it a wilder look than its more manicured heritage-tree neighbours. Short, sharp thorns guard the base of each leaf, the source of both its common name and part of the Greek genus name, which references the fruit's resemblance to a monkey's earring. Those fruits split into coiled, rose-red pods each spring, exposing a sweet white pulp around glossy black seeds that draws yellow-vented bulbuls and Oriental magpie robins to disperse them, and the same pulp is eaten by people elsewhere in its native range as a sour-sweet snack or juice.