Oahu's most remarkable trees are not scattered across the island but concentrated on fourteen acres in downtown Honolulu: Foster Botanical Garden, a 19th century private collection the city took over and kept growing. A baobab, a Bodhi tree descended from the one in Bodh Gaya, a kapok older than the garden itself, a cannonball tree that drops its fruit from the trunk, and a quipo with a trunk soft enough to cut with a knife all stand within a five minute walk of each other, behind one modest entrance fee.
0 of 6 visited in Oahu
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The Foster Garden Baobab
Baobab (Adansonia digitata) · planted in the 1930s, roughly 90-100 years · Chinatown / Downtown Honolulu
Honolulu calls this one the Dead Rat Tree. The nickname is the seed pods: grey, furred, hanging on long stalks all around the crown, and once you have seen them you cannot unsee them. Under the pods is an African baobab, planted in Foster Botanical Garden in the 1930s and already carrying a trunk close to thirteen metres around. Ninety-odd years for that waistline is quick work, even for a species that grows a trunk largely to store water in it. The city's Exceptional Trees register gives its height as about twenty metres and rates its condition good.
Baobabs belong to dry African savanna, where they stand bare for months and flower at night for bats. This one has spent its whole life on fourteen acres of downtown Honolulu at the edge of Chinatown, on ground that was a private botanical collection long before the city took it over. It sat out a 1.26 million dollar renovation that closed the garden completely, and was still standing when the gates reopened in August 2023.
About twenty five of Oahu's hundred or so protected Exceptional Trees grow inside these same fourteen acres. That is the argument for the entrance fee: nowhere else on the island puts this many designated trees within a five minute walk of each other.
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2
The Foster Garden Bodhi Tree
Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · about 113 years, planted 1913 · Chinatown / Downtown Honolulu
The tree the Buddha is said to have sat under has descendants, and one of them grows in downtown Honolulu. This sacred fig was raised from a cutting of the Bodh Gaya lineage in India and arrived as a sapling in 1913, a gift to Mary Foster from Anagarika Dharmapala, the Sri Lankan reformer who spent his life campaigning to return that Indian temple to Buddhist hands. Foster planted it in her garden and went on to become a major patron of Buddhism in Hawaii, paying for the islands' first Buddhist temple.
The tree is about 113 years old now, roughly fifteen metres tall, with a trunk over seven metres around, and the city's Exceptional Trees register rates its condition excellent. Sacred figs are easy to identify once someone shows you the leaf: heart-shaped, drawn out into a long thin tail, hung so loosely on its stalk that the whole crown moves in air you cannot feel on your own skin. A tree that moves on a still day is the sort of thing people build religions around.
It is one of the few trees in this garden whose value has nothing to do with its size. There are bigger and far stranger specimens within a hundred metres of it. This is the one with a paper trail back to India and a woman who knew exactly what she had been given.
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3
The Hillebrand Kapok
Kapok (Ceiba pentandra) · roughly 175 years, planted around 1851 · Chinatown / Downtown Honolulu
The oldest tree in Foster Botanical Garden is older than the garden, because the man who planted it lived here first. William Hillebrand, the German physician and botanist who made this ground his homestead, put a kapok in at around 1851. That gives it roughly 175 years. It was already a mature tree when the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893, and a very large one when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Its height is not in doubt. Honolulu Magazine and the city's Exceptional Trees register both give 88 and a half feet, about 27 metres, which is also how we know the two are describing the same trunk. The trunk itself they disagree on, and not by a little. The magazine reports 151 inches around, a shade under four metres. The register records 6.98 metres. The two have never been reconciled, so both stand here rather than one being quietly chosen. Some of the gap is probably method: a kapok throws out buttress roots like thin walls, and the answer changes depending on the height at which you measure.
Standing at the base, the buttresses are the point anyway. They rise past head height and divide the ground around the trunk into separate rooms, which is what a rainforest giant does when it has to hold itself up in shallow soil.
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4
The Foster Garden Cannonball Tree
Cannon Ball Tree (Couroupita guianensis) · Chinatown / Downtown Honolulu
The garden has put up a sign beside this tree warning visitors about falling cannonballs, and it is not a joke. Couroupita guianensis grows its fruit straight out of the trunk rather than from the branches, woody spheres somewhere between a grapefruit and a shot put, hanging on thick stalks that push out of the bark itself. Botanists call the habit cauliflory. Gravity calls it a hazard. A ripe one comes down from height and splits open with a smell that carries.
The flowers work the same way and are the reason to come: waxy, orange and pink, each one a shell-shaped hood over a dense spray of stamens, opening in ropes down the trunk at eye level while the crown sails on 29 metres above. It is a South American tree, from the Amazon and the Guianas, soft-wooded and fast, and the city's Exceptional Trees register rates this specimen's condition excellent. It is the most straightforwardly strange thing in a garden that is not short of competition.
One thing about it is missing: nobody has recorded when it went into the ground. If you know the planting date, or know someone at the garden who does, tell us and it goes on the page.
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5
The Foster Garden Quipo
Quipo (Cavanillesia platanifolia) · about 96 years, planted 1930 · Chinatown / Downtown Honolulu
This trunk is soft enough to cut with a knife. The quipo comes from the forests of Panama and Colombia, where it grows wood about as dense as balsa and gets felled for rafts and dugout canoes rather than for anything expected to hold weight. The tree wears that wood in a shape to match: smooth, greenish-grey, swollen low down and tapering upward, closer to a water tank than to anything with bark on it. Honolulu Botanical Gardens' own record puts the planting at 1930, which makes this one about 96 years old.
It has reached roughly 26 metres. That figure comes from the city's Exceptional Trees register alone and has not been checked against a second measurement, so treat it as the best number available rather than a settled one. Its seedpods are the other reason to look up: large, papery and winged, built to spin on the way down. The register rates the tree's condition excellent.
It stands near the centre of the garden, which is about right, because it is the specimen most visitors cannot name and cannot walk past either. Nothing else on these fourteen acres looks less like a tree, and that includes a baobab.
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6
The Hitachi Tree
Rain Tree (Samanea saman) · about 130 years · Moanalua
This rain tree is on Japanese television most weeks, and almost nobody watching knows it is in Honolulu. Hitachi has used it as the company emblem since 1973, with a jingle that begins "this tree, what tree", and it is famous enough in Japan that visitors arrive at Moanalua Gardens asking for it by the company's name rather than the tree's.
What brought the advertising people here is obvious from the lawn. A rain tree grows outward rather than upward, and this one has spent about 130 years doing it: roughly 25 metres tall and a crown wide enough to shade some three thousand square feet of grass, held up on limbs that reach almost horizontally before turning. Stand under the middle and the canopy closes overhead like a roof.
The leaves do something worth timing your visit for. The leaflets fold shut in the late afternoon and before rain, which is where the name comes from, and the light through the canopy changes completely when they do. Hawaii knows the species as the monkeypod, and that is the name on the sign.
The gardens are privately owned and charge admission, which is unusual for a tree on this site and worth knowing before you drive out. The lawn around the trunk is open, so you can walk right up to it.
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