Buah Keluak

This is the most amazing plant. Its fruits are so poisonous and yet they are eaten as delicacies from Southeast Asia to the Pacific islands. I am talking about Pangium edule. Locally we know the fruits of this plant as Buah Keluak whose seeds are used as the significant ingredient in the nonya dish Ayam Buah Keluak (see black cooked seeds in picture above).

We have an old tree in The Garden. It flowers and fruits regularly although sparingly. The fruits are like papayas but hard, roughly textured and brown (see picture above right - fruit surrounded by seeds).

Inside the fruit, embedded in yellow pulp are the large seeds. Each seed has a hard shell. The raw seeds taken from the fruits are highly poisonous. Native people apparently have found ways to detoxify the seeds before consuming them. One way apparently is to boil the seeds without their shells in several changes of water before leaching them in flowing streams or rivers for a few days. Another way is to boil the seeds with the shells intact and then burying the boiled seeds in ash for over 40 days. The seeds we can buy in our markets in Singapore are apparently detoxified by the latter method.

The next time you enjoy a meal of Ayam Buah Keluak, take time to marvel at this amazing plant - so poisonous yet so edible. Fascinating.

Fill-a-Bowl

We know this locally as "Pung Tai Hai" in hokkien which to me, literally mean "expand to fill a big sea". The English name is "Fill-a-Bowl" and is a direct translation from its Malay name "Kembang se-mangkok". The plant is Scaphium macropodum. It is a large forest tree with the most unusual fruit. The fruit forms as a large green thin-walled pod. When ripe, it turns brown and splits on one side to form a boat-shaped membranous structure with a pearl-shaped seed sitting at the end (see top picture). This year was an exceptional fruiting year for our tree and heaps of fruits littered the ground around the tree.

When the seed is soaked in water, it will produce a brown jelly that will "fill-a'bowl". Actually the jelly came from the thin outer wall of the seed. This jelly is actually an adaptation to help the seed with its germination as the jelly absorbs water when it rains and retains the moisture for a couple of days at least.

Traditionally people drank this jelly to treat fever, cough, asthma and dysentery. Today it is a popular addition to local deserts.

The Giant

There is a giant outside my window. This great tree, the Silk-cotton or Kapok towers over the House. It is a native of the Amazon. There it is one of the largest trees of the jungles. Periodically this tree loses its leaves, sometimes from a few branches or from most of the tree. Seeing brown leaves blown from the tree by the wind is one of the most delightful experiences and the new leaves when they appear are a most refreshing padi green.
Sometimes flowers and fruits will be produced after a leaf-drop. The fruits like fat cucumbers are about 15 cm long. When ripe they split to reveal masses of silky cotton with pea shaped seeds hidden within. Fluffy bits of cotton are then carried by the breeze to carpet the grass with bits of cloud. I had collected a jar of them from a past fruiting season - see picture; the black seeds are embedded within the fluffy cotton bits.

This great tree is probably about a hundred years old and has massive buttresses from it base going up to over three metres from the ground. Spreading widely from the tree are large snake-like roots that children delight in playing on. Huge though it is, some leafy branches actually hang down almost to the ground. This giant stands patiently rain or shine and is always a comforting presence and always there.

Midnight Horror

In late 2005 I collected seeds of the plant known rather sinisterly as the "Midnight Horror" (top pic : winged seeds). This plant was growing just outside the town of Kuala Pilah in Malaysia. Back home in Singapore, the seeds germinated and now there is a sapling Midnight Horror growing in The Garden. Can't wait to see how it will grow into the tree that Paul Theroux described in his book The Consul's File as ".. a tall simple pole like an enormous coat-rack, with big leaves that looked like branches - but there were very few of them. It was covered with knobs, stark black things; and around the base of the trunk there were always fragments of leaves that looked like shattered bones, but not human bones."

All Things Grow

All Things Grow - we live in hope that as long as we provide the care and attention, all things will grow. The element of good luck and chance will come into play but we should always go forward in hope that All Things Grow.