The Temak of Main Gate Road

This tree flowered and fruited three times between 1983 and 1986, then went quiet for a quarter of a century before doing it three times again between 2012 and 2014. Dipterocarps mast on a clock nobody has fully worked out, and the Temak is a dipterocarp a long way from home: its range runs from India through mainland Southeast Asia to the northern end of Peninsular Malaysia, and it does not grow wild in Singapore at all. Heritage Trees here are usually gazetted once they pass five metres in girth. This one measures 3.46 metres and was gazetted anyway, in 2013, which is what happens when the species itself is rare enough that size stops being the argument. It stands 27.2 metres over Main Gate Road, about five minutes inside the Tanglin Entrance. NParks thinks it went into the ground in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and that it is probably one of the dipterocarps planted along this road by Wong Yew Kwan, the country's first Commissioner of Parks and Recreation. The hedging is theirs and worth keeping: nobody wrote the planting down. A tree with a GPS fix, a height and a girth measured to the centimetre still has an age given as a rough decade, which is the ordinary condition of most trees in a city that grew faster than its paperwork.