Local tradition says this monkeypod is 200 years old and arrived as a gift from an Indian prince, the first of its kind planted on the Garden Isle. The arithmetic does not hold. Monkeypod is generally recorded as reaching Hawaii around 1847, which is 179 years ago, so a 200-year-old specimen would predate its own species' arrival by two decades. It is a fine story about the tree and a poor fact about its age, which is why the age field here is empty. What is measured is the trunk: 8.53 metres round, the largest monkeypod figure on Kauai in the exceptional trees register, holding up a crown that covers the entire front yard of the Gulick-Rowell House. The house is the reason the address matters. Reverend Peter Johnson Gulick began building it in 1829 and Reverend George Rowell finished it by 1846, and the restoration project now working on it calls it the oldest house on Kauai. It is closed while that work goes on. The tree is in full view from Huakai Road, and the pin marks where to stand. Wood from one pruned limb has already been made into tables at Kokee Lodge. Nobody has dated it. If you know who put it in, tell us.
Gulick-Rowell House, 9567 Huakai Road, Waimea, HI 96796You can recognise it by the trunk, 8.53 metres round, the largest monkeypod on Kauai, its crown covering the whole front yard. It stands at the Gulick-Rowell House on Huakai Road, Waimea.
Free, from the street. The monkeypod stands in the front yard of the Gulick-Rowell House on Huakai Road, a historic house under restoration and not open to visitors. The tree fills the yard and is in full view from the public road; the pin marks where to stand.
In Waimea town, walkable from the town centre
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Hawaii Exceptional Trees register (Hawaii DLNR, via data.honolulu.gov), no. 1148
- Hawaii Exceptional Trees register (data.honolulu.gov, CC0), register_id 1148
- bigislandnow.com
- kauai.com
