The Stonewall Fig of Ka Wai Man Road

Hong Kong's government files this tree under two categories at once, and the second is the interesting half. The Old and Valuable Trees register lists it as OVT and SWT together, Old and Valuable Tree and Stonewall Tree, and the department responsible for it is not the one that runs the city's parks. It is the Architectural Services Department, which looks after government masonry. The whole story sits in that administrative detail: this fig is maintained by the people who maintain walls, because a wall is what it grows out of. The measurements are serious. A trunk 1.8 metres through, seventeen metres tall, a crown spreading twenty-four metres, and an inspection record noting three separate leans, one growing toward the light, one a response to load, and one the tree corrected by itself, which is what decades of pushing out of vertical stonework and rebalancing looks like written down. No age has ever been published for it. It sits above Ka Wai Man Road in Kennedy Town, a hundred metres from the Forbes Street wall, so it extends that walk rather than repeating it. One caveat to carry along. This corner of Kennedy Town has been an active redevelopment site since late 2022, and although the register inspected the tree in March 2023, after the work started, check the garden is open before making the trip for this tree alone.