Rubber Trees - Marsiling Park and The Singapore Botanic Gardens

 

Stop 5: Marsiling Park

At first glance, Marsiling Park has the look of any modern national park in Singapore. Manicured to perfection, this park with Chinese pavilions, an extensive playground and a wonderful children's playground. There is a small section of mangrove and there are undeniably a lot of butterflies, but I don't think this is the most interesting part of this park.  

This park, initially called the Woodlands Town Garden was renamed Marsiling Park to commemorate the rubber plantations that use to thrive in the Marsiling area.

I never realised that the area had a history of being a rubber plantation because there are no rubber trees in the area.

To find out more about rubber trees, I decided to go to the Botanic Gardens to find out more. There I found the Botanic Gardens Heritage Museum which explained the history of rubber. This is what the museum had to share.

The History of Rubber in Singapore

< Images of the world map of where key cash crops were cultivated; and para rubber seeds.

In the past, the Botanic Gardens was the centre of Botany research in Southeast Asia. Botanists experimented with different kinds of cash crops which were grown all over the world.

Different species of rubber were experimented with and tested. It was found that Para rubber was the most successfully grown in our local climate.

Rubber seeds were distributed to anyone who wanted to try their hand at growing this potential crop, and plantations were erected all over the Seletar and Marsiling area.

Rubber had huge potential because of latex. Researchers at the Botanic Gardens continued to try different methods of tapping which would extend the life of the trees. They were successful in finding a way to do so while tapping on the trees at a younger  age. This technique is called the Herringbone technique.

Rubber became an important cash crop which was exported all over the world from Southeast Asia. Eventually, as Singapore started running out of land to grow rubber, Chinese and Caucasian businessmen started their own rubber plantations in Malaysia and relied on Singapore to refine and process the latex into rubber.

This formed a huge part of Singapore's economy in the past.

                                                  

                                                                     Image: Herringbone method of tapping rubber trees

                                                    Tools of the trade: How they tapped the trees

Conclusion

Even though rubber is far from the minds of Singaporeans today, rubber has been integral to the development of Singapore's economy. The simple tools our forefathers used to tap rubber, or the rubber seeds that were brought into Southeast Asia are just as much of an innovation as our modern computers and internet today. While agriculture is often not an environmentally friendly practice, introducing nature in our economy mindfully can be a way to be sustainable. Sustainability was on the minds of our forefathers way back in the past as well. 

Rubber trees are now a heritage crop in Singapore, something that our children may not ever see close up. The remaining rubber trees we have reminds us of where Singapore started and grew to what it is today.