What is the oldest tree in Maui?
The oldest tree on this list is the Lahaina Banyan, planted on 24 April 1873 and so 153 years old, in Lahaina Banyan Court Park at the corner of Front Street and Canal Street. It is also the only one of the four anybody has dated, so read it as the oldest we can prove rather than the oldest tree on Maui. One thing to know before driving there: the park has been closed since the August 2023 wildfire and a perimeter fence keeps visitors back from the tree and from the burned-out Old Lahaina Courthouse beside it. The tree is visible from the fence line and from Front Street. As of February 2026 a full arborist assessment was still pending and county officials hoped to reopen the park before the end of the year if it proved safe.
The banyan can be dated because its planting was an occasion. Sheriff William Owen Smith put it in on 24 April 1873, a seedling sent by missionaries in India, to mark fifty years since the first American Protestant mission in Lahaina, and somebody wrote the date down. Nothing like that exists for the other three trees on this page. The record behind those three explains why. Hawaii protects individual trees under Act 105 of 1975, and the exceptional trees register that results carries species, girth, height, condition and owner. It has no age field at all. Where a newspaper or a local history has published a planting date there is an age to give; for these three nobody has, and a girth figure on a fig or a monkeypod will not stand in for one. So three of the four trees here carry no recorded age, and one of them, a kiawe on the West Maui coast road, rests on the register alone. If you know when any of them went in, tell us and we will add it. See all four on the Maui page.
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