The Foster Garden Chaulmoogra Tree

For decades before antibiotics, this tree's seed oil was one of the only real treatments for leprosy, and in 2020 gardeners carried its pods to the one place in Hawaii where that history still matters most. Chaulmoogra oil, pressed from the seeds of Hydnocarpus anthelminthica, treated Hansen's disease across Asia for centuries and then in the West through the early twentieth, before sulfone drugs replaced it in the 1940s. This is not the chaulmoogra tree on the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus that honours chemist Alice Ball, who worked out how to make the oil injectable; that is a separate tree, a gift from the King of Siam in 1935. This one stands in Foster Botanical Garden with no plaque, just a trunk pushing three metres round and a crown thirteen metres up, rated in good health. In 2020 Oahu's Master Gardeners collected its pods and took them to Kalaupapa, the Molokai settlement where people with Hansen's disease were once confined by law, to grow an exhibit tree on that ground. Nobody has recorded when this one itself went in. If you know, the page is asking.