The Larger Kalopa Kopiko 'ula

A kopiko 'ula is a slender thing, a coffee relative that rarely clears 13 metres and almost never gets thick. This one has a trunk 3.26 metres round. We have not found a larger one recorded anywhere, and the species grows nowhere outside Hawaii. Trees like this are what an old forest produces when nobody interferes with it for long enough. Kalopa protects roughly a hundred acres of native Hawaiian rainforest above the Hamakua coast, most of the rest of which went to cane and then to pasture, and inside that fence an understory species that normally stays modest has run to something close to a record. The state rates its condition fair rather than good, which is worth knowing before you walk out to it: this one is a heavyweight, not a portrait. It sits on the same 0.7 mile loop as its much slimmer and much taller counterpart, and the pair of them are the best argument the trail makes for how variable a single Hawaiian species can be. The state register is the only source that names this tree individually. The park's own trail notes describe the forest rather than its members, so the measurement rests on one authority instead of two. Its age is blank, as it is for everything here, because Hawaii's register records trunks and does not date them. If anyone has counted the rings of a kopiko 'ula, tell us.