The Stone Wall Trees of Forbes Street

When engineers first drew up plans to extend the MTR through Kennedy Town, a wall of nearly thirty banyan trees stood directly in the way, and after a 2005 flash-mob campaign by the Conservancy Association, the MTR rerouted the station underneath the old Kennedy Town Swimming Pool instead and built an exit specifically to leave the wall alone. Twenty-seven Chinese banyans and figs grow straight out of three stone masonry retaining walls along Forbes Street, roots fused into brickwork some records date to the 1890s, when the street was first laid out near the American Forbes family's Hong Kong Rope Works. It is the largest tree wall of its kind in the city, out of roughly 1,200 masonry wall trees recorded across Hong Kong, and several of its oldest specimens are individually listed on the government's own Old and Valuable Trees register. Stone wall trees grow the way this dense, hillside city forced them to: a seed lands in a crack, roots spread through mortar instead of soil, and given enough decades the tree and the wall become one structure, impossible to remove one without damaging the other. That, as much as the 2005 campaign, is what actually saved this one. It stands on an ordinary residential street a few minutes from the tram terminus, walls and trees together, exactly where the fight to keep them left them.