The Jelutong of Lawn S

You can see this tree from the Bandstand, which is odd for a tree standing inside a forest. The jelutong is an emergent: it does not stop at the canopy but pushes its crown out above it, and at 29 metres this one clears everything around it. What is around it matters as much as the tree. It grows on Lawn S, inside the Gardens' patch of primary rainforest, one of only two fragments of Singapore's original forest left anywhere on the island. The species is native here, so this is a tree standing in something close to the vegetation it evolved in, in the middle of a city that has built over almost all of it. Its sap made chewing gum. Gutta jelutong was tapped across Malaya as a base for the stuff, and the pale, soft timber went into pencils, which is a strange double career for a tree in a country that banned the sale of chewing gum in 1992. Nobody has dated it. The register offers no estimate at all, only four metres of girth and that height, and for once the height is the more interesting number: a native tree, in native forest, tall enough to be picked out from a lawn several hundred metres away. If anyone has measured or dated this one, we would like to hear it.