The Fort Canning Rain Tree

This rain tree spreads its umbrella-shaped canopy directly over a public stairway that carries walkers out of Fort Canning Park onto Hill Street, so almost everyone who takes those steps passes under it whether they notice or not. Rain trees only arrived in Singapore in 1876, imported from tropical America and planted heavily through the colonial coffee and nutmeg plantations that once covered much of the island, and this specimen's own planting date was never recorded, though its 4.93 metre girth points to a tree well over a century old. Its most reliable feature is not size but timing: every evening, roughly ninety minutes before sunset, its paired leaflets fold shut, and they do the same on overcast days, a light-sensitive reflex that gave the species both its English name and its Malay one, Pukul Lima, five o'clock. Fort Canning Hill itself was the seat of the ancient Kingdom of Singapura before it became a British fort and then a public park, so a tree standing sentinel over one of its main entrances is, in a small way, guarding ground with a longer history than the tree itself. Clusters of pink-and-white flowers appear through the year without a single dramatic peak, and the pods that follow ripen dark and fleshy, adding to the tree's already broad, low silhouette.