What is the oldest tree in Oahu?
Oahu's oldest documented tree is the Hillebrand Kapok in Foster Botanical Garden, planted around 1851 by the garden's founder, William Hillebrand, on what was then his own homestead. That makes it roughly 175 years old, older than the garden itself.
Foster Botanical Garden holds five of the six trees on this page, and the sixth stands eight kilometres away under a ticket of its own, and its own founding is younger than its oldest tree. William Hillebrand planted a kapok on his Honolulu homestead around 1851, decades before the property became a public botanical garden; it now stands about 27 metres tall with a trunk somewhere between four and seven metres around, depending on which of two disagreeing sources you read. Two more of the garden's trees carry documented arrival dates: a Bodhi tree grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gaya lineage, given to Mary Foster in 1913, and a baobab planted in the 1930s that has already grown a trunk thirteen metres around. A cannonball tree and a quipo, the softest-wooded tree in the garden, round out the five, both flagged for gaps rather than disputes: nobody has recorded when the cannonball tree was planted, and the quipo's height comes from a single source. Those five stand within easy walking distance of each other inside the garden's fourteen acres, along with roughly twenty other city-designated Exceptional Trees this page does not yet cover.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.