The Foster Garden Quipo

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.