The Wilcox Banyan Tree

The road this tree was planted beside no longer exists. George N. Wilcox of Grove Farm put it in in 1895 on a curve of the Papalinahoa Road, which came down off Kuhiau Ridge to Nawiliwili. The tree stayed and the road went. What grew up around it instead is the Banyan Harbor Resort, so it now spends its days on the grounds of a working condo complex rather than in a park. The drive in is open and the tree is impossible to miss, but go knowing that this is somebody's address. By the local paper's account it covers about two acres and has put down more than a thousand aerial roots. Its height is genuinely disputed and nobody has reconciled the figures: the county register recorded 38 feet, the newspaper says about 110. The trunk measurement they agree on is 6.58 metres. Kauai County declared it an exceptional tree in 1976, after the cultural guardian Sarah Kailikea argued its case. The same newspaper column that told its story in 2013 went back to it this year and found it still flourishing. That makes 130 years, in the course of which its road vanished and a resort was built around it.