The Nemesu of the Rainforest

Forty-four and a half metres is roughly a fourteen-storey building, and that is the height of this tree, standing in the middle of Singapore. The nemesu is an emergent dipterocarp, built to push a straight bole clear of everything around it, and the species can carry that trunk to sixty metres. This one is six metres round at chest height, thick even by the standards of the city's heritage register. It is also an endangered species, and this tree did not arrive in a pot. It stands inside the six hectares of surviving rainforest held within the Singapore Botanic Gardens, ground the Gardens grew around rather than laid out. UNESCO listed the Gardens as a World Heritage Site in 2015. You do not walk up to it. NParks says it can be seen from a nearby footpath and is easily viewed from Lower Ring Road. The rainforest patch is not somewhere to wander into, and the tree is big enough that this hardly matters. Look for scaly bark and the plank buttresses spreading from its base. The species has a road named after it across town, Nemesu Avenue by Lower Peirce Reservoir. Nobody has published this tree's age, and dipterocarp growth varies too much from site to site to work one out from the girth. If anyone has a figure, we would like it.