The Iolani Palace Banyan

The register gives this banyan a girth of nearly twenty-two metres. That number is not one trunk. Roughly sixteen major trunks have fused around the original stem and the tape goes round the whole cluster, which is how an Indian banyan works: aerial roots come down, thicken, root, and become trunks in their own right until one tree occupies a courtyard. It is the most prominent tree on the mauka side of the Iolani Palace grounds. Who put it there is disputed. One account credits Queen Kapiolani with planting it; another says it arrived as a gift from Indian royalty to King Kalakaua, with Kapiolani again doing the planting. Both point at the same window, the early 1880s, when Kalakaua was building the palace itself between 1879 and 1882. That gives roughly 140 years, and the band stays wide because the planter is genuinely in question even though the era is not. So the tree is about as old as the palace it shades, and it was already large when the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893. Cuttings from it were reportedly carried to Kailua Bay in Kona and to Hulihe'e Palace. It is still in service. The palace rents the ground beneath it as the Banyan Terrace, so people now get married under a tree a queen is said to have planted.