Han Rambutan Orchard, Upper Thomson Road

"Singapore is often known as a Garden City, but this is an impersonal image of anonymous trees and gardeners. Our project aims to boil this generic image down to specifics by exploring the concrete, personal connections that Singaporeans have made with trees. After all, what is loving nature without loving the individual plant? Through our interviews, we found that people relate to plants in touching and occasionally surprising ways. Besides featuring in individual stories, trees are living, breathing markers of history. The trees in our collection are of different ages. Some are old native species from pre-colonial times when Singapore was mostly a freshwater swamp forest; others are younger trees that their owners planted from seeds.

Individual Art Description: This rambutan tree, featuring grafted parts from different trees, is one of the surviving specimens from a private orchard owned by the late businessman and ceramics expert Han Wai Toon.

In this 2½ acre orchard, he not only produced what the Singapore Free Press reported as the “perfect rambutan” in 1960 by grafting, but also hosted visiting artists, poets and intellectuals. These included Nanyang artist Lim Mu Xue, who subsequently did a painting of the garden, and Chinese artist Xu Bei Hong, who dedicated an artwork featuring rambutans to Han.

In its heyday, there were 200 rambutan trees in the orchard. The orchard was sold to other owners in 1962 when Han left Singapore and was later converted into a chicken farm. The farm was eventually evacuated when the state acquired the land. Now the place is overgrown and nearly impenetrable."