Botanic Garden Trip

INTRODUCTION

History of Botanic Garden

The Singapore Botanic Gardens is a dynamic and living monument to the foresight of the founding fathers of Singapore. Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore and a keen naturalist, established the first botanical and experimental garden on Government Hill (Fort Canning Hill) in 1822, shortly after his arrival in Singapore. He aimed to introduce cultivation of economic crops such as cocoa and nutmeg.

Parts of the Botanic garden

Tanglin core, Central core and Bukit Timah core.

The structure of flower

Fantastic trip

Inga edulis

-Inflorescence in dense axillary spikes of flowers, each consisting of a calyx tube with 5 lobes, a corolla tube with 5 lobes, and a large number of white stamens up to 4.5 cm long, united in a tube in the lower half.

Cannonball tree

The Cannonball Tree flowers do not have nectar, so these flowers are mainly visited by bees in search of pollen.

Both the fruit and the flower grow from stalks which sprout from the trunk of the tree.

The flowers are attached to an upwardly bent, white fleshy disk.

In pollination, fertile stamens can be found in a ring around reduced style and stamens. The sterile pollen is located in the anthers. As a bee enters to pollinate the flower, its back rubs against the ring with fertile pollen; this allows the bee to carry the fertile pollen to another flower. The differences in the pollen are as follows: the pollen of the ring stamens is fertile, while the hood pollen is sterile.

Sterculia Foetida

The flowers open during 0700-1000 am and are visited by bees for pollen only and by flies for nectar. While foraging, flies contact anthers and stigma by their back, and bring about pollination, flies (Chrysomya megacephala) being the major pollinator by virtue of its frequency of visits and larger body size.