The Jamuju of Lawn H

This jamuju went into the ground on 30 January 1956, one of the last survivors of a conifer collection that once filled much of what is now the Tanglin Core of the Botanic Gardens. Seventy years on it stands nearly 19 metres tall, its trunk 2.6 metres round. Dacrycarpus imbricatus is a tropical conifer, native across a band from southern China through Southeast Asia to the Pacific islands, in forest that is disappearing through much of that range. Its wood has gone into construction and furniture over the decades, its resin burned as fuel where it grows wild. It stands on Lawn H beside the much older, unplanted Marsh Pulai, a fair comparison of a tree the Gardens grew deliberately from a sapling against one that was already standing on this ground before the Gardens themselves existed. Neither tree needed replanting or replacement in the decades since, which on a lawn this close to the Gardens' main paths is its own quiet proof of how well both have been looked after.