The Nutmegs of the Economic Garden

Orchard Road is named after orchards, and the crop in them was nutmeg. Singapore grew it hard through the 1840s until disease went through the plantations in the 1860s and took the industry with it. These two trees are not survivors of that boom. They are the closest thing to it still growing in the city. They stand a few metres apart in the Central Core, on the ground of the Gardens' Economic Garden, laid out in 1879 to work out which tropical crops could be made to pay here. Nutmeg was already the answer that had failed, kept on as a specimen, and this pair are among the last of those crop plants left standing. The register lists them separately. A visitor sees one thing: two trunks a little over a metre round each, neither the sort of bulk that stops anyone in their tracks. What they do have is fruit. Nutmeg trees are either male or female, and both of these are female. The fruit is a yellow, apricot-shaped thing that splits to show a scarlet lace cage wrapped around a single dark seed. The cage is mace. The seed is nutmeg. One tree, two spices, priced separately for centuries. Nobody recorded when either of them went in. If you know, tell us.