The Foster Garden Rainbow Shower Tree

Every rainbow shower tree in Hawaii is a clone of a tree that no longer exists, and this garden holds a cutting taken from it while it was still alive. In 1918 territorial forester David Hughes hand-pollinated a yellow shower tree with a pink-and-white one. The hybrid is sterile, which is why it puts its energy into flowering rather than seed pods and blooms longer than either parent. Businessman Edward Tenney planted an early specimen at his Makiki Heights home around 1920. That original tree is gone. What survives is what his descendant Wilhelmina Tenney cut from it and gave to this garden in the late 1940s, which is why the cultivar carries her name rather than the forester's. A grafting method perfected in 1960 let the city plant the hybrid everywhere, and in 1965 Honolulu made it the official tree of the city and county, an odd honour for a plant that cannot reproduce on its own. This one, on the garden's Daibutso Terrace, measures just over three metres round the trunk and stands about sixteen metres tall, rated excellent at its last inspection. Since 2024 a plaque beside it has told a second story: a local history project's research into the tree's place in Hawaii's mahu and queer histories, marked with talks held under its branches that October.