The Queen's Medical Center Pink Bombax

For a few days in late March this tree covers itself in pink flowers shaped like shaving brushes, garish enough that Honolulu Magazine reached for exactly that word. The new leaves follow deep red and only settle into green later, and while the tree is actively growing the bark takes on a green tone and visibly swells. It was planted by William Hillebrand, the German botanist who served as royal physician in nineteenth-century Honolulu and whose kapok still stands in Foster Botanical Garden. The reason is on record: Queen Emma wanted the hospital grounds to be welcoming to the people who came to them, and Hillebrand planted to that brief. Honolulu Magazine puts the tree at more than 150 years old, which is the only figure anybody offers. Read it as a floor rather than a measurement, because nobody has narrowed it since. The trunk has been taped once, by the city's Exceptional Trees register, at 3.75 metres round, with its condition rated good. That single entry is the whole measurement record. It stands to the right of the roundabout on the Queen's Medical Center campus, a working hospital whose outdoor grounds anybody can walk through, a few minutes from Iolani Palace. Fifty weeks of the year it is a well-shaped green tree on a hospital lawn. The last week of March is the one to put in the diary.