Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society/Volume 32/Golden Flowers
Golden Flowers.
There was living in Singapore not many years ago a Chinaman in very poor circumstances, who possessed, however, a small garden, in which grew a plant of the Pandan Wangi (Pandanus laevis), a tree which is often cultivated for its scented leaves used for flavouring rice and for making a kind of pot pourri used at weddings. He supplied the tree liberally with manure, and one moonlight night be was surprised to see it bearing a red flower. Going to examine it next day, no flower was to be seen, but next night it was there again, and he climbed up and got it, and put it on a table in his house. On the following morning he found it was changed into gold, and broke off a bit and took it off to sell. On returning, he found the bit he had broken off had grown again, and this continued till he became a very rich man. On his death the flower disappeared, and the family became comparatively poor again. The Pandan Wangi very rarely flowers (indeed I have never seen the flowers of it), and the male flowers are white and sweet-scented, like those of any other Pandanus.
Recently a Javanese who was in the Botanic gardens on a moonlight evening perceived on the stem of a wild fig-tree (Ficus Miquelii) at a height of about ten feet from the ground, a red flower about as big as a large marigold. Not knowing the peculiarity of the Gold flower, he went to call a companion to look at it, when it immediately vanished, nor has it reappeared. It seems that the gold flower objects to a crowd, and will only be visible to certain fortunate persons, and this cooly, by calling a companion to see it and not immediately seizing the flower, bas missed his opportunity of becoming a wealthy man. It is hardly necessary to say that the flowers of the fig are enclosed in the fig itself, which is mistaken for the fruit by the natives, who imagine that fig-trees have no flowers at all but only fruits. And thus, as, like the Pandan, it has normally no flowers, it is just the kind of tree you would expect to find gold flowers on.