The Haili Street Kamani

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.