The Snake Tree of Main Gate Road

This tree has a birthday. It was planted on 5 November 1937, a date recorded for the specimen itself rather than for the road or the garden around it, which makes it one of the few large trees in the Singapore Botanic Gardens whose age is a fact rather than an estimate. It was four years old when Singapore fell in February 1942, and it has stood on Main Gate Road, opposite the Marsh Garden, through everything since. It is 30.6 metres tall now, with a girth of 4.6 metres. The name is about the fruit. Snake Trees carry long, splitting seed pods that hang down from the branches and look convincingly like something that could drop on you. The flowers are the better show and much harder to catch: white with a pink flush, they open in the evening and are on the ground before dawn, so anyone arriving at a civilised hour sees the previous night's flowering scattered across the path rather than the tree in bloom. Come at dusk if you want the actual thing. The species belongs to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia and was brought here. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2013, seventy-six years after somebody dug the hole and wrote down the date.