The Banyans of Thomas Square

Honolulu's oldest public park did not always have shade. Thomas Square was set aside as parkland in 1850, but the banyans came decades later, when the Scottish merchant Archibald Scott Cleghorn took over as steward in 1882 and brought cuttings from Ainahau, his own Waikiki estate, to plant here. The overhauled park reopened to a brass-band crowd on 7 April 1887, and by the 1930s four banyans ringed the new central fountain, where they still stand. They are Indian banyans, Ficus benghalensis, named in a University of Hawaii extension guide that singles out this exact grove as the reference specimen for the species in the islands, adding dryly that Disneyland's own banyan nearby is artificial. Cleghorn is better known today as the father of Princess Kaiulani and, later, Governor of Oahu; Ainahau, the estate these cuttings came from, held its own famous banyan, the one under which Robert Louis Stevenson used to read poetry to his young daughter. Thomas Square has been public land since 1850, protected as a city park since 1925, and free to walk every day, no ticket and no gate, with King Street traffic on one side and the Honolulu Museum of Art across Beretania. Come toward evening and the fig-eating mynahs that roost here nightly make the banyans' size obvious from the noise alone.