The Kuhio Beach Hula Mound Banyan

The register puts forty metres of circumference around this tree, and not one centimetre of it is a trunk. Banyans grow sideways and downward. The limbs throw out aerial roots, the roots reach the sand and thicken into pillars, and the pillars fuse into a mass that a tape measure has to treat as one object because there is no honest way to treat it as several. Honolulu's exceptional tree register, set up under a 1975 state law that let the counties protect individual trees by name, records this one at 4,053.8 centimetres around and about 21 metres tall, vitality good. That circumference is the whole fused base rather than a stem, and it cannot be turned into an age: growth rate dating assumes a single trunk, and nothing about a banyan is single. So nobody knows how old it is. No planting date has surfaced anywhere, which is a strange gap for a tree with a stage underneath it. The Hula Mound sits directly beneath the crown, on Kuhio Beach, and on Saturday evenings the free hula and music shows run there with the banyan as the roof. The Duke Kahanamoku statue stands about sixty metres up the sand. No gate, no ticket, no closing time. If anyone has a date for it, we will take it.