The UH Manoa Art Building Baobab

When the University of Hawaii tore down Gilmore Hall in 1973, one thing did not move. Art faculty and students had grown fond of the baobab already standing beside the old building, and when its replacement went up, the tree stayed exactly where it was and the new Art Building was built around it. More than fifty years later it still stands pressed against the exterior wall, close enough that photographs make it look almost part of the structure. The University calls it the largest baobab in the United States, and the claim is plausible: baobabs are native to Africa and Madagascar and rarely reach this size far outside the tropics they evolved in, let alone on a university campus in the middle of the Pacific. The tree was already about 30 years old when the building rose around it, which puts its planting somewhere in the early 1940s, before Hawaii became a state. Nobody has taped its girth for the record, and no register lists one. What survives instead is the story everyone on campus already knows: a tree stubborn enough, and loved enough, that an entire building changed shape to keep it standing.