The Sausage Tree of the Sundial Garden

A ripe fruit on this tree is a grey-brown cylinder up to a metre long, hanging from a cord of a stalk, heavy enough that nobody sensible stands under one for long. That is the whole species in one glance, and it is where the name comes from. The Gardens kept the paperwork for this particular tree. It arrived from Honolulu on 13 May 1931 and went into the ground on 19 October the same year, one of the tropical species being trialled here for economic and medicinal value, in an era when whether a plant was useful decided whether it earned a place. It has held its patch of lawn beside the Sundial Garden ever since. In its native Africa the fruit is both useful and dangerous. Raw it is poisonous. Processed it goes into herbal remedies and fermented drinks, and in several communities a fruit is buried in place of a body when there is no body to bury. The flowers that come before it are deep maroon, smell of nothing anyone would choose, and open at night for bats rather than bees. Ninety-five years in, though, the sausages are the point. Once set they hang for months, which makes this one of the few trees on this list with something to show whichever week you turn up.