The Koloa Baobab

A baobab is not what anybody expects to find behind a church in Hawaii. This one stands near the southeast corner of the yard at Koloa Missionary Church, and it sits on the county's register of exceptional trees, which records its condition as excellent and then stops. No girth, no assessment date, no planting record. The register does not even fix the species: it lists the tree as Adansonia, the baobab genus, without saying which baobab it is. You will not mistake it for anything else. The genus carries an enormous swollen trunk and a crown of thin branches that look like roots held up in the air, which is worth the short walk over from the rest of Old Koloa Town on its own. The most recent independent confirmation we could find is from 2016, when the Outdoor Circle featured it in a series on favourite trees. That is a long gap for a tree we are sending people to, and the pin marks the church rather than the trunk, because the register's coordinate is a grid point rather than a position. If you have stood in front of it lately, or you know which baobab it is or who put it there, tell us.