The Marsh Pulai of Lawn H

Nobody planted this tree. The Botanic Gardens' own record calls it a survivor of the swamp forest that stood on this ground before the Gardens were founded in 1859, and it names no planting because there genuinely was none to name. NParks puts it at more than 160 years old, perhaps much older, on a trunk six metres round and a pagoda-shaped crown reaching nearly 32 metres. Marsh pulai is critically endangered in the wild in Singapore now, down to an estimated 15 specimens left across the island's two nature reserves. In swampy ground the species usually grows pneumatophores, upright breathing roots that poke through the mud; this one does not, because the Gardens' soil here drains too well for it to need them. It stands on Lawn H, beside a much younger conifer, the Jamuju, planted in 1956, close enough to make one stop of both and compare a remnant of the old forest against a tree the Gardens grew themselves.