The Foster Garden Baobab

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.