The Mountain Teak of Lawn B

Singapore's Botanic Gardens once held a serious conifer collection where this mountain teak now stands, planted somewhere in the decades after Superintendent N. Cantley's first plant list of 1882. NParks is honest about what that record can and cannot prove: the list survives, but with no way to match its entries to specific trees still standing today, so nobody can say with any confidence that this particular tree goes back that far. What is measured is a trunk 3.49 metres round, taken low at half a metre up, and a crown 16.4 metres high. Mountain teak, or jati bukit, is a podocarp rather than a true teak, one of the conifer family's few tropical members, and this is a rare mature specimen of it standing in a city garden rather than a forest. It stands on Lawn B near Main Gate Road, by Swan Lake, close enough to its Botanic Gardens neighbours to fold into the same walk. If you know how old it actually is, tell us.