The Garden City Made Somebody Else Famous. The Forest Kept His Name.

The job he was hired for became another man's legacy. The forest he measured for free is the thing that kept his name.

In June 1963, Lee Kuan Yew planted a Mempat sapling at a traffic roundabout. The middle of a drought. He said planting trees would help bring rain.

That's the Garden City story. One man, one tree.

I never thought about who kept the trees alive afterwards.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The man in charge was a forester from Ipoh.

The Straits Times called him an Oxford-schooled silviculturist. A scientist of growing trees. His name was Wong Yew Kwan.

Coming here cost him a career. In Malaysia he was Deputy Chief Research Officer at the Forest Research Institute. In 1970 he laid out ten research plots at Pasoh with the ecologist T.C. Whitmore. The same year, he moved his family to Singapore.

He joined the agriculture department. By the mid-1970s he was Commissioner of Parks and Recreation.

His team planned gaps in the middle of flyovers, so sun and rain reached the greenery below. Roadsides got rain trees and angsanas, for the shade.

Then the phone started ringing.

Lee Kuan Yew walked the Botanic Gardens in the evenings. Afterwards his personal secretary would call. In Wong's words: "Mr Lee might see pruned branches left on the side of the road. Or he wanted to know why the leaves had fallen from a troubled tree."

Wong, decades later: "It was quite a lot of pressure!"

Here's the part almost nobody tells.

While he was Commissioner, Wong was also working in Bukit Timah. From 1974 to 1978. He laid out 20 clusters of circular plots and measured 889 wild trees. Unpaid, as a Malayan Nature Society volunteer.

It was the first proper quantitative survey of primary forest ever done in Singapore.

The man running the state's manicured greenery was, on his own time, the country's first forest surveyor.

Retirement sent him deeper in. NParks commissioned him in 1991 to survey the Central Catchment. His team measured 7,462 trees. Each plot centre got a thick plastic pole.

That data shaped Singapore's nature reserve policy for three decades. Researchers had a name for the plots. The Wong Yew Kwan plots.

He died in December 2021, aged 89. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote that "much of the greenery around us today can be credited to Yew Kwan and his team." Then an old idiom. The predecessors plant the trees, the descendants enjoy the shade. "In Yew Kwan's case, this is literally true."

Here's what stays with me:

The city gets remembered under another man's name. Wong co-wrote a book about it. The title: Garden City Singapore: The Legacy of Lee Kuan Yew.

The job he was hired for became someone else's legacy.

The forest he measured for free kept his name. All 60 plots were re-established by 2023, as the backbone of NParks' long-term monitoring.

What's the work you do that nobody asked for — and would you be glad if that turned out to be the part with your name on it?