What is the oldest tree in Hilo?
The oldest tree in Hilo is the kamani at the corner of Haili Street and Ululani Street, on the pavement outside Haili Congregational Church. The Hawaii Tribune-Herald put its age at 194 years in 2014, which makes it about 206 now, so it was standing here before the church beside it and before Hilo was a town of any size. Hawaii's exceptional-tree register records it at 12.2 metres round and rates its condition good. One caution about its name, because the register and the town disagree. The register files it as a False Kamani, Terminalia catappa, the tropical almond. Local usage, including that newspaper piece, drops the qualifier and calls it a kamani, which botanically means a different tree altogether, Calophyllum inophyllum. This page follows the register on the species and the newspaper on the age. What makes it visible from across the street: Terminalia catappa throws its branches out in flat horizontal whorls that stack up the trunk, so it reads as a series of green plates rather than a dome, and its leaves turn red and drop in a place where almost nothing else changes colour.
Hawaii protects trees in an unusual way and it shapes this whole page. Act 105 of 1975 lets each county designate individual specimens as exceptional trees, and the designation attaches to the tree rather than to the land, which is why the register names single trunks in car parks and on street corners instead of naming woodland. The City and County of Honolulu publishes the resulting database under a public-domain dedication, and despite its title it covers all four counties. Two things about that source govern what this page can say. It carries no age field at all, so every year given here comes from a newspaper or a local history rather than from the register, and where nobody has published one the page says so instead of estimating. And its coordinates are rounded to about a kilometre, with several Kalakaua Park trees sharing a single point between them, so every pin here is marked approximate and each entry describes what to look for once you are standing in the right park. See the full list of five on the Hilo page.
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