What is the oldest tree in Kauai?
The oldest tree on Kauai that anybody can actually date is the Kanoa Banyan at Niumalu, planted for Paul P. Kanoa, governor of the island, at some point in his 1882 to 1886 term, which makes it about 140 years old. It stands roughly 84 feet east of Hulemanu Road on the way down to the Menehune Fishpond, and its trunk and root mass together measure close to twenty metres round, the largest figure recorded for any tree on Kauai in the state's exceptional trees register.
Kauai has no thousand-year-old trees, and the dates explain why: the island's designated trees are overwhelmingly species people carried here, and the oldest of them went into the ground during the sugar era. The Kanoa Banyan has the firmest window of any of them. The Garden Island, the local paper, records that it was planted by the men of Paul P. Kanoa, governor of Kauai from 1882 to 1886, in his honour and on his own land, that it still flourishes at Niumalu, and that Kauai County declared it an exceptional tree in 1990 at the request of the family who owned the property by then. That puts it at roughly 140 years. One tree could in principle beat it and cannot prove it: the monkeypod at the Gulick-Rowell House in Waimea, which local tradition dates to 200 years, a figure that fails because monkeypod is generally recorded as arriving in Hawaii around 1847. The Wilcox Banyan at Nawiliwili is the documented runner-up, planted in 1895.
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