The Loulu Palm of Kalakaua Park

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.