The Hillebrand Kapok

The oldest tree in Foster Botanical Garden is older than the garden, because the man who planted it lived here first. William Hillebrand, the German physician and botanist who made this ground his homestead, put a kapok in at around 1851. That gives it roughly 175 years. It was already a mature tree when the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893, and a very large one when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Its height is not in doubt. Honolulu Magazine and the city's Exceptional Trees register both give 88 and a half feet, about 27 metres, which is also how we know the two are describing the same trunk. The trunk itself they disagree on, and not by a little. The magazine reports 151 inches around, a shade under four metres. The register records 6.98 metres. The two have never been reconciled, so both stand here rather than one being quietly chosen. Some of the gap is probably method: a kapok throws out buttress roots like thin walls, and the answer changes depending on the height at which you measure. Standing at the base, the buttresses are the point anyway. They rise past head height and divide the ground around the trunk into separate rooms, which is what a rainforest giant does when it has to hold itself up in shallow soil.