The Queen's Medical Center Baobab

A sign in Foster Botanical Garden sends visitors away from its own baobab. The oldest baobab in town, it says, is not the one in the garden but this one, under a mile away on the lawn of a working hospital. Older, then, but not bigger. This trunk goes 11.8 metres round and Foster's is thicker still, so the claim rests entirely on age, and age is the one thing nobody has. The city's Exceptional Trees register records the species, the girth and a condition of good, and leaves the age blank. The enthusiast survey that has catalogued Honolulu's baobabs one by one, and that walked here with a hand-held GPS to fix the spot on the ground, found no planting date either. A second Honolulu photographer gets as far as massive and ancient. So nobody has dated this tree. If you know when it went in, tell us and it goes on the page. What is not in question is the bulk. Adansonia digitata puts on that kind of trunk largely to hold water through a dry African season it will never meet on Punchbowl Street, and having been planted somewhere it never has to ration anything, it has simply kept going. It stands outdoors on the street side of the hospital grounds, free to walk up to, ten minutes from Iolani Palace.