A sacred fig grown from a cutting of the tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, brought to the island by Sanghamitta in the third century BCE.1
It has an unbroken documented history of tending going back over two thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest recorded planted trees anywhere. That continuity is itself the point: the record of its care is a record of the institutions that maintained it across every dynastic and colonial disruption.