The Foster Garden Bodhi Tree

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.