ABSTRACT
On 23 November 2002 newspapers in Singapore reported the felling of a 150year-old tree, the last standing specimen of the Hopea sangal in Singapore. Changi, the name of the eastern part of the island where the tree was found, is said to have come from the tree’s Malay names, “Chengal Pasir” or “Chengal mata kuching”. The tree was cut down by a property management company whose officials feared that the tree, already infested with termites and recently struck by lightning, could be a safety hazard to the residents and some of the houses in the area.2 The felling of the tree caused much upset among conservationists in Singapore; in the Singapore Heritage Society’s web discussion group emails flew around, lamenting the loss of the tree and calling for a petition to be sent to the property company and the National Parks Board to demand for the return of the tree trunk. Fuelling unhappiness on the one hand by reporting that the tree had but flowered recently, the papers also provided reassurance that all was not lost, for twenty seeds from the tree were being nurtured by the National Parks Board. The conservationists’ distress bore an all-too-familiar strain, rich with nostalgia and a sense of severing with not only the thing but also what it can symbolize. The element of possibility is important for it sustains as well as continues to generate the sense of a lost historical landscape as well as what that landscape could have stood for. From the government’s viewpoint, the environment does not only make the city-state’s “historic” identity evident; it also manifests the city’s burgeoning self-projections and future metamorphoses. This dual function of the environment can be inferred from the mission statement of the Heritage Trees Scheme set up by the government’s green conservation body, the National Parks Board, on 17 August 2001:
Majestic mature trees are the natural heritage of Singapore and serve as important green landmarks of our green Tropical Garden City. They help to create a sense of
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permanence and identity to the place we live in. Just as our Garden City, it takes decades and in some cases, more than hundred [sic] of years for these trees to mature gracefully in our landscape.3
