Three of these five stand in one small park in downtown Hilo, and the other two are a short walk away. Hawaii protects individual trees by law rather than the ground they stand on, and Kalakaua Park holds three of them: a banyan planted in 1882 whose aerial roots have grown into props, a divi-divi from the dry Caribbean that has no business in a town with three metres of rain a year, and an endangered native palm found nowhere but these islands. A tropical almond of about 206 years stands outside a church on Haili Street.
0 of 5 visited in Hilo
1
The Kalakaua Park Banyan
Indian Banyan (Ficus benghalensis) · about 144 years · Downtown Hilo
Two men are credited with planting this banyan and they cannot both be right. Wikipedia and a Hilo guide both say Sheriff Luther Severance put it in at the west end of Kalakaua Park in 1882, which makes it about 144 years old. A newspaper account from 1964 credits King Kalakaua himself. Neither source settles it and this page does not pick.
What is not in dispute is the size. The exceptional-tree register puts 18.6 metres around it, and that figure is not a trunk: Ficus benghalensis drops aerial roots that thicken into props, and the measurement runs around the whole buttressed mass. Standing under one is less like meeting a tree than walking into a room with a ceiling.
It had a twin. When Waianuenue Avenue was widened, Sheriff George Williams had the other original moved about five miles up to Kaumana, which in 1882 terms is a remarkable thing to attempt and in any terms is a remarkable thing to survive.
Hawaii protects individual trees by law, under Act 105 of 1975, and the designation attaches to the specimen rather than to the ground it stands on. This one is in the middle of downtown Hilo with a lawn under it and two more protected trees in the same small park.
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2
The Haili Street Kamani
False Kamani (Terminalia catappa) · about 206 years · Downtown Hilo
The register calls it a False Kamani and the newspaper that loves it does not. In 2014 the Hawaii Tribune-Herald ran a piece on the treasured kamani tree at the corner of Haili and Ululani, gave its age as 194 years, and left the qualifier off, which is the usual local shorthand. Botanically the two are unrelated: true kamani is Calophyllum inophyllum, and this is Terminalia catappa, the tropical almond, whose leaves turn red and drop in a place where almost nothing else changes colour.
Take the newspaper's figure forward and the tree is about 206 years old now, which puts it here before the church it stands beside, before Hilo was a town of any size, and before anyone thought to write down what was growing on this corner.
The register records 12.2 metres around it and rates its condition good. Terminalia catappa grows in tiers, with branches thrown out in flat horizontal whorls that stack up the trunk, so from across the street it reads as a series of green plates rather than a dome.
It stands on the pavement outside Haili Congregational Church, which means you can walk up to it at any hour without asking anyone.
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3
The Rainbow Falls Banyan
Indian Banyan (Ficus benghalensis) · Rainbow Falls / Wailuku River
The register designates this tree and then records nothing about it. No girth, no height, no condition: just an Indian banyan at Rainbow Falls, protected under Act 105 like the rest, with every measurement column left blank.
So what stands here is described rather than measured. It grows along the trail that continues past the upper viewing platform above the falls, away from the crowd that stops at the railing, and it is the sprawling aerial-root kind of banyan rather than a single trunk: props coming down from the limbs and rooting where they land, which is how one of these walks slowly sideways over a century.
Nobody has published an age for it either, and that is the honest state of it rather than a gap we intend to fill with arithmetic. Banyans cannot be aged from girth anyway, because the figure would be a measurement of the whole colony rather than of one stem.
Wailuku River State Park is free and open from sunrise to sunset, and the falls themselves are the reason most people come. The tree is the thing you find by walking two minutes further than they do. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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4
The Divi-Divi of Kalakaua Park
Divi-Divi (Caesalpinia coriaria) · Downtown Hilo
A divi-divi is a strange thing to find protected in a Hawaiian town square. Caesalpinia coriaria comes from the dry forests of the Caribbean and Central America, it is the national tree of Curacao, and its seed pods were harvested for the tannin that turned hides into leather. Nothing about that story runs through Hilo, which gets more than three metres of rain a year.
It is here anyway, at 3.3 metres round, in good condition, one of three protected trees in Kalakaua Park along with the 1882 banyan and an endangered native palm. Hilo's own downtown walking tour includes the park's trees and describes them as more than a century old as a group, which is corroboration for the park and not a date for this tree, so no age is claimed here.
The species is worth looking at properly once you find it. Divi-divi grow slowly and hold their branches in a lopsided, wind-combed way even where there is no wind, and the pods curl into tight brown spirals that look more like something that fell off an animal than off a tree.
The park is small, open daily and free, and it sits in the middle of downtown, which makes all three of its trees one short stop rather than three.
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5
The Loulu Palm of Kalakaua Park
Loulu Palm (Pritchardia beccariana) · Downtown Hilo
This palm is endangered in the wild and it is growing in a public park. Pritchardia beccariana is one of roughly two dozen loulu species found nowhere on earth but Hawaii, all of them threatened, and this one is native to the Big Island specifically. Rats eat the seeds, which is most of why they are disappearing.
Hawaii's exceptional-tree register lists it at 26 feet tall and rates its condition fair, which is an honest reading rather than a reassuring one. No girth is recorded, and none would help: a palm is not a tree in the way the ageing arithmetic assumes, with no annual rings and no secondary thickening, so nobody can put a number on how long it has stood here.
Loulu once covered lowland Hawaii in forests dense enough that early accounts describe them as impassable. What is left is scattered specimens and small protected stands, which makes a healthy one in the middle of Hilo something closer to a museum piece than a park planting.
It shares Kalakaua Park with the banyan and the divi-divi, so all three are one stop, and it is the only one of them that belongs here.
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