The King Banyan of Kowloon Park

A third of this banyan's trunk came down in a 2007 typhoon, and what remains is still recognised as Hong Kong's largest urban tree by trunk girth, a title the government's own tree register gave it in 1997 when arborists put its age at around four hundred years. Indian laurel figs are common street trees across the city, planted by the thousand along roads and in parks, but almost none of them are left to grow old and wide the way this one has, standing above the spectator stand of Kowloon Park's mini soccer pitch since long before the park existed. The ground beneath it was British military land from the 1890s until 1967, part of the former Whitfield Barracks, three years before the Urban Council turned the site into a public park. The tree is old enough to have shaded soldiers on parade before it ever shaded families with strollers. It is now fighting a slower fight than the typhoon: brown root rot, a fungal disease that has spread through several of Hong Kong's oldest trees, has been detected in its roots, and the government has kept it under continuous monitoring and treatment rather than felling it, a decision conservation groups pushed hard for when the disease was first found. The crown still spreads wide enough over the pitch to be unmistakable, cracked trunk and all.