The West Indian Locust Tree of Corner House

The flowers smell of sour milk and the pods stink when you bruise them, which does a poor job of advertising the sweet, edible pulp inside those pods. Children across the tree's home range worked it out anyway, and have been eating it for as long as anyone has written about the species. This one stands 32.8 metres over the lawn beside Corner House, with a girth of 3.63 metres and smooth pinkish-brown bark that cracks open where the big branches leave the trunk. It was gazetted a Heritage Tree in 2014. The West Indian Locust is an American tree, from the Caribbean and tropical South America, grown for a hard timber and for copal, the resin it bleeds, which went into varnish for centuries before synthetics took that trade away. The species reached Singapore in 1875. That is the date the plant arrived in the country, not the date this particular tree went into the ground, and the two are not the same claim: nobody recorded when this specimen was planted, and the register does not pretend otherwise. So it goes on the map with a height, a girth and a coordinate, and no age at all. If you have seen a planting record, an old photograph or a garden plan that fixes it, tell us and we will put the number on.