The Zoo Gate Banyans

The best tree at the Honolulu Zoo is outside the ticket gate. Two banyans flank the entrance on Kapahulu Avenue, standing in the public grounds of Kapiolani Park rather than in the zoo, and benches have been built in a ring around the trunk of the seaward one. Sitting under it costs nothing. The city's Exceptional Trees register carries them as two separate entries, the mauka tree and the makai tree. That is bookkeeping rather than something a visitor experiences: walk up to the gate and it is one cluster of banyans over one entrance, which is how the Historic Hawaii Foundation describes it too. The makai tree's measurements are the ones worth quoting, 16.5 metres round and a little over five metres across the trunk. Its neighbour's numbers contradict each other in the register and are best left alone until somebody re-measures. Neither has been dated. Banyans arrived in Hawaii in the late 1800s as a species, but that is a fact about the species and not a planting date for these two, and no register or historic listing supplies one. If you know, tell us. An Indian banyan does not grow upward so much as outward. Aerial roots drop, thicken and set as trunks, and the tree walks across the ground over decades. These two have had long enough to throw shade over the whole entrance, and over everyone queuing to pay.