The Kanoa Banyan Tree

Twenty metres round is not a normal measurement for a tree. This banyan comes to 19.87 at the county's assessment, the largest figure recorded against any Kauai entry in the exceptional trees register, and it gets there the way banyans do: by dropping aerial roots that thicken into extra trunks until one tree becomes a grove of itself. Height 64 feet, condition excellent. It was planted for a politician. The men of Paul P. Kanoa, governor of Kauai from 1882 to 1886, put it in on his own land in his honour, which makes the tree about 140 years old and the oldest on this list anybody can actually date. The property later passed to the Achi family, and in 1990, at their request, Kauai County declared it exceptional. The island's newspaper looked in on it again this year and reported that it still flourishes. It stands roughly 84 feet east of Hulemanu Road, on the way down to the Menehune Fishpond, and that sentence is as precise as the record gets. The register describes rather than plots, so our pin marks the road and not the trunk. In practice that is enough. Look for the largest thing in sight.