The Kalana Pakui Banyan
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.
Kalana Pakui Building (former police station), 250 South High Street, WailukuOn the lawn of the Kalana Pakui Building at 250 South High Street, the 1925 county building that used to be the police station. Smaller leaves and a heavier, fused trunk mass than the monkeypod up the street at the church.
Free. On the grounds of a public county government building (built 1925 as the police station, now county offices) in the Wailuku Civic Center Historic District; visible and reachable from the street and the building's public lawn.
In central Wailuku, on South High Street
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- en.wikipedia.org
- Hawaii Exceptional Trees register, row 988 (State of Hawaii DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife, CC0)