The Kalopa Hame

Hame is a small tree. The botanical references give it four to ten metres, fifteen at the very outside, and it spends its whole life under somebody else's canopy. This one has a trunk 2.16 metres round, which is wider than your arms will reach and which no field guide would predict. That is the likeliest reason Hawaii singled it out for protection under its exceptional tree law, which lists individual trees rather than whole habitats. Antidesma platyphyllum grows nowhere but these islands, and nobody travels to see one. It is a filler species, the kind of plant that quietly occupies the middle storey of a native rainforest under the koa and the ohi'a. The Kalopa nature trail passes roughly twenty-five native species in 0.7 miles, several of them present as a single individual, and this hame is very likely one of those singles. That is the case for walking the loop slowly. A hame of this size is not something you come across on an ordinary hillside, because ordinary hillsides on this coast were cleared long ago. Only the state register names this tree by itself, so the girth is their figure and we have not found a second measurement of it. Its age is unrecorded and we would rather leave the field empty than invent one. If you know of a count, tell us.