The Johor Fig of the Rainforest

The tape goes fourteen metres around this fig, and almost none of what it measures is trunk. Johor Figs begin as stranglers, germinating high in the crown of another tree and letting roots down around it until the host is wrapped, shaded and dead. What you reach from the rainforest boardwalk is the result: a fused column of prop roots and stems that grew as scaffolding around something else and stayed on as the structure. It is 26.6 metres tall, short for a species that can pass 45, and it grows in the six-hectare patch of rainforest inside the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Ficus kerkhovenii is critically endangered in Singapore, and the handful of places where one still reaches this size can be listed on one hand. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2012. The name is Dutch colonial botany. The epithet honours E.J. Kerkhoven, the Dutch botanist who died in 1905, and the common name points across the strait to Johor. There is no age on it, and a strangler does not really have a clean one to give. It started as a seed dropped by a bird or a bat into someone else's branches, and the tree that carried it through its first decades is long gone.