Jalan Access

Why are they called Rain Tree?

According to a report on Species Profiles for Pacific Island Agroforestry specifically on Rain Tree by Staples & Elevitch.

It has been attributed to:

• The leaflets are light-sensitive and close together on cloudy days (as well as from dusk to dawn), allowing rain to fall through the canopy to the ground below.

• The grass is often much greener under a rain tree than the surrounding grass.

• A steady drizzle of honeydew is often created by sap-sucking insects.

• Nectaries on the leaf petioles excrete sugary juice that sometimes falls from the tree like rain.

• During heavy flowering, stamens can drop from the canopy like rain.

Massive Rain trees along Access Road, Tawau. Tawau Town is the town with the most Rain Trees in Sabah.

Providing shades to the road users, rain tree is the legacy of the colonial past. In those days, British planted rain tree to counter the unbearable heat and sun shine in Malaya then.

ferns blanketing the rain tree branches. It is easily recoqnized by its characteristic umbrella-shaped canopy providing excellent shades from the burning mid-day tropical sun, making it a popular tree to be planted along roads and parks.

The tree grows up to 25 m tall with widespread umbrella-shaped crown. The bark is fissured and chocolate colored whilst the trunk is slightly crooked. The leaves are 20-30 cm long, compound with 3-6 pairs of side stalks; 6-8 pairs of leaflets arise on each side stalk, which are small, (3x2 cm) and almost rhombic in shape.

Flowers which are pink in tassel-like heads are to be found in clusters from leaf axils with numerous stamens.

The fruit is long and straight, 15-25x1.5 cm, with many seeds which are separated by partitions; the seed measuring 1.5 cm long and is brown in color.

The numerous rain trees (samanea saman) found all over parts of Tawau town are not native to the country and orginates from South America.

The Rain Tree was introduced to Peninsular Malaysia before 1876 and is now a common sight as a roadside shade tree throughout the country. Cross cuts of the tree are used as table tops due to the excellent growth rings they display.

Rare palm tree embraces death after flowering

Nearly 100-year old palm tree of rare species still stands at Access Road.

Planted during the British rule in Tawau.

When this species of palm tree flowered for the first and only time before bearing fruits, the tree will graduelly dye out.

This type of palm tree dies soon after bearing fruit.

A self-destructing palm tree that flowers once every 100 years and then dies

It is the largest palm species and not many existence in Sabah..

This plant has been quietly living and dramatically dying in Tawau.

It does not flower for 100 years and when it flower the tree embrace a slow dead.

The flower is a large shoot, a bit like an asparagus, grows out of the top of the tree and starts to spread.

Something that looks like a Christmas tree growing out of the top of the palm.

The branches of this shoot then become covered in hundreds of tiny white flowers that ooze with nectar, attracting insects and birds.

The effort of flowering and fruiting depletes the tree so much that within a few months it collapses and dies..

Talipot, a native of southern India

flowering of the Talipot palm.
whose stalk bearing a million clustered flowers is the largest of any plant in the world.

Corypha umbraculifera (Talipot palm) is a species of palm, native to southern India (Malabar Coast) and Sri Lanka.
It is one of the largest palms in the world; individual specimens have reached heights of up to 25 m, with stems up to 1.3 m in diameter. It is a fan palm (Arecaceae tribe Corypheae), with large palmate leaves up to 5 m in diameter, with a petiole up to 4 m, and up to 130 leaflets. The Talipot palm bears the largest inflorescence of any plant, 6-8 m long, consisting of one to several million small flowers borne on a branched stalk that forms at the top of the trunk (the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), from the family Araceae, has the largest unbranched inflorescence, and the species Rafflesia arnoldii has the world's largest single flower). The Talipot palm is monocarpic, flowering only once, when it is 30 to 80 years old. It takes about a year for the fruit to mature, producing thousands of round yellow-green fruit 3-4 cm diameter, containing a single seed. The plant dies after fruiting.