Maui's most famous tree is currently behind a fence. The Lahaina banyan, planted in 1873 and grown into sixteen trunks, came through the August 2023 fire that destroyed the town around it, and the park it stands in has been closed ever since, so you look at it from Front Street. The other three are elsewhere on the island and open to anyone: a monkeypod in a Wailuku churchyard, a fig on the lawn of a county building that used to be the police station, and a kiawe on the coast road to Olowalu.
0 of 4 visited in Maui
1
The Lahaina Banyan Tree
Indian Banyan (Ficus benghalensis) · 153 years (planted 1873) · Lahaina
The fire that destroyed Lahaina on 8 August 2023 burned the courthouse beside this tree and went over the park it stands in. Maui County's arborist used that word himself: it skipped. The banyan was scorched rather than killed, and roughly 40 percent of its canopy came off afterwards, branches dried out by the superheated air along Front and Hotel Streets.
It went in on 24 April 1873, a seedling sent by missionaries in India and planted by sheriff William Owen Smith to mark fifty years since the first American Protestant mission in Lahaina. Banyans do not stay one tree. Aerial roots come down off the limbs, thicken and turn into trunks, and by 2005 there were sixteen of them under a crown covering two thirds of an acre, a quarter of a mile around its edge. That canopy, rather than any trunk, is what makes it the largest banyan in Hawaii.
Where it goes from here is genuinely unsettled. A branch snapped in February 2026 and arborists found fungus inside it. A full assessment, tension tests and cambium checks, was being organised rather than scheduled, and the chair of the county's arborist committee put the position plainly: nobody knows what is under the skin.
The park is still fenced and closed. You look at it from Front Street, across the ground where the courthouse stood.
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2
The Ka'ahumanu Church Monkeypod
Rain Tree (Samanea saman) · Wailuku
Eight and a third metres round, and nobody has written down when it was planted. Hawaii's exceptional trees register lists this monkeypod at Ka'ahumanu Church with 8.35 metres of trunk, 11 metres of height and its condition rated excellent, and it gives no age, because the register has no age field. Nobody else has published one either.
What it does have is an address with a long memory. The church behind it is the fourth building on this site since 1832 and the oldest stone church still in use on Maui, finished in 1875. The congregation's own description of its grounds names the trees before it names anything else: the monkeypod, the kukui, the mango and the kou. This is the monkeypod, singular, and it is the one Wailuku means when it talks about looking after the tree at the church.
Monkeypod is the Hawaiian name for the rain tree, Samanea saman, a species that spends its growth going sideways rather than up. Eleven metres tall is nothing much; the limbs are the point, reaching out low and near-horizontal until the crown shades most of the churchyard. It stands on South High Street in Wailuku, well outside the ground the Lahaina fire took.
The register records the church rather than the tree, so our pin marks the lot and not the trunk. If you know when this one went in, tell us.
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3
The Kalana Pakui Banyan
Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · Wailuku Civic Center Historic District
Wailuku's police station moved out and left the fig. The Kalana Pakui Building went up in 1925 to a design by William D'Esmond, served the town as its police station, and now holds county offices at 250 South High Street in the Wailuku Civic Center Historic District. On its lawn stands an Indian laurel fig that is nearly eleven metres round.
The exceptional trees register gives the numbers: Ficus microcarpa, 10.94 metres of trunk, 16 metres tall, condition good, owner Maui County. That last field is the useful one for a visitor. The tree belongs to the county, it stands on the lawn of a public building, and getting to it involves no gate, no ticket and nobody to ask.
Ficus microcarpa is the small-leaved cousin of the banyan over in Lahaina and it thickens the same way, dropping roots off its limbs that reach the ground and fuse into the trunk mass, so eleven metres is a measure of accumulated tree rather than of one stem.
Two gaps worth naming. The register is the only source we found that records this particular tree, so the building is well documented and the tree rests on a single line in a database. And nobody has published an age for it. Anyone standing in front of it with a tape measure or a local memory can help us close both.
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4
The Honoapi'ilani Highway Kiawe
Kiawe (Prosopis pallida) · Olowalu / Ukumehame coast
Kiawe only reached Hawaii in 1828, carried over from Peru, so whatever this tree's age turns out to be, it has a ceiling of about two centuries. It is still one of the largest of its kind recorded on Maui: 8.1 metres round, 9 metres tall, condition good, on the register the state keeps of its exceptional trees.
It grows on the ocean side of Honoapi'ilani Highway near mile marker 11, on the stretch between Ma'alaea and Olowalu. The land belongs to the state transport department, which is why the register can enter it as visible from the street and reachable, and why the visit costs nothing and involves nobody: you pull over and walk to it. Kiawe is a mesquite, a genus that makes its living in dry country, which is the short explanation for how a tree this size comes to be standing on a hot leeward coast where little else gets tall.
This is the thinnest entry on the page. The register is the only source we found for it, and the pin is a mile marker plus a grid reference rather than a fix on the trunk, so treat the map as pointing at the right kilometre of road. If you have stopped at it, tell us where exactly it stands and we will move the pin.
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