The Mangrove Apples of Chek Jawa

These two mangrove apples are, according to NParks' own register, the only mangrove trees among Singapore's 251 heritage trees, standing together beside the old House No. 1 at Chek Jawa, on the far side of Pulau Ubin from the mainland. Getting there already takes effort: a bumboat from Changi Point to Ubin, then a walk or bike ride to the free boardwalk that lets visitors cross the wetland without touching the mud beneath it. The trees themselves spend part of every day partly submerged, rising and falling with the tide in a stretch of shoreline built almost entirely on salt tolerance. Around their bases, pneumatophores, root structures that poke straight up through the mud like a field of woody snorkels, let the trees pull in oxygen from air rather than the waterlogged, anoxic soil their main roots sit in. To manage the salt that soil carries, they concentrate it in their oldest leaves and simply shed them, a slow-motion filtering system with no equivalent among ordinary garden trees. Chek Jawa itself very nearly does not exist as a public reserve at all. It was slated for land reclamation in 2001 until a citizen-led biodiversity survey and public campaign got the plan shelved, meaning this pair of trees, unremarkable in age but singular in the register, sits inside a wetland Singapore almost paved over entirely.