Forty-nine metres around.
Indian Banyan
Ficus benghalensis
An Indian banyan does not grow a single trunk so much as recruit one. We map 12 of them, in 6 cities.
Aerial roots drop from its limbs, thicken into props where they reach the ground, and fuse with their neighbours into a mass that a tape measure reads as one continuous trunk, which is why the girth can run to absurd lengths without the tree being especially old. Brisbane's, in the City Botanic Gardens since the 1870s, measures 49 metres round. Singapore's in Tiong Bahru Park reached 22.8 metres of girth in under sixty years. Hawaii planted them in every town square. The Lahaina Banyan, set out in 1873 to mark fifty years of the town's first Protestant mission, grew sixteen trunks under a crown covering two thirds of an acre; the 2023 fire that destroyed the courthouse beside it scorched the tree and took much of its canopy, and it is still standing.
Brisbane
Oahu
Don the Beachcomber ran his office out of this tree.
The register gives this banyan a girth of nearly twenty-two metres.
Photo: w_lemay (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Honolulu's oldest public park did not always have shade.
This banyan was already seven years old when somebody planted it, and it was about seven feet tall.
The best tree at the Honolulu Zoo is outside the ticket gate.
Photo: Linzy L (CC BY-SA)
The register puts forty metres of circumference around this tree, and not one centimetre of it is a trunk.
Photo: Daniel Ramirez (CC BY 2.0)
Singapore
A girth of 22.8 metres usually takes a tree several centuries.
Hilo
Two men are credited with planting this banyan and they cannot both be right.
The register designates this tree and then records nothing about it.
Kauai
Twenty metres round is not a normal measurement for a tree.
Maui
The fire that destroyed Lahaina on 8 August 2023 burned the courthouse beside this tree and went over the park it stands in.
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