The Ka'ahumanu Church Monkeypod
United StatesMauiWailuku
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.
Ka'ahumanu Church, 103 South High Street, WailukuIn the churchyard on the High Street side of Ka'ahumanu Church, the 1875 stone church with the tall white steeple. The monkeypod is the wide, low, flat-topped one; the kukui, mango and kou on the same grounds are all smaller.
Free. On the grounds of a working historic church (the oldest continuously used stone church on Maui, fourth building on the site, built 1875), open during daylight hours; the tree stands in the churchyard along High Street.
In central Wailuku, on South High Street
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.