In 1861, the first director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Lawrence Niven, planted a tiger orchid at the intersection of two paths, near today’s Curtain of Roots, a pergola hosting a long fringe of aerial roots. Still growing in the same spot after all these years, the now giant 5-meter-wide orchid is believed to be the world’s oldest and largest. …
The huge caged tiger orchid is believed to be a wild Singaporean specimen. It’s an interesting scientific development considering that, until recently, the wild tiger orchid had been widely considered extinct for nearly a century.Heidi Sarna & Jerome Lim
Secret Singapore, p. 141: ‘Singapore Botanic Gardens’ Tiger Orchid’
Who knows where they grow, or why?
All I can tell you is that I survived
hundreds of years of interbreeding, and inbreeding
and left it all behind.
I am a sense that a flower does not make a man
so much as envelops him, and gives him
a tan, because the heat of the lion's den
just becomes so ferociously strong, when you are wrapped in
a bouquet of queerness, a gay that knows fierceness
only comes when you have a frangipani on your head,
and one over your heart,
and two on your hands;
if you a need a fifth, the last one is Fuad
or me, when I am standing
or striding across the city as her only Merlionsman
and flaming Dreamorchard, a song from the more heathen
times, and ways of bringing forth new life:
we grow whereever we want to,
and go whereever we so find ourselves drawn to creep and climb.
I am only a thing of ragged, untempered beauty;
I am hybrid, and hopeful, and everything more than you could ever design.