flora – Geraldine Birch

Lahaina’s Banyan Tree

By Geraldine Birch | August 21, 2023

Note: I wrote this essay in 2020, many years after visiting it in 1980. It has always stayed in my memory of Lahaina. Because of the terrible tragedy that Lahaina recently suffered with a devastating fire, this beautiful monarch is one of the many victims. Now tree surgeons from around the Hawaiian Islands are trying…

The Banyan Tree

By Geraldine Birch | December 4, 2020 |

Lahaina Town’s monstrous one-hundred-seventy-year-old banyan tree covers a whole block across from the harbor. One can sit on a bench under the tree’s spread and see the harbor twinkling through its branches, but it’s the banyan that commands the eye, not the water. The tree’s many trunks (16) reach deep into the island’s soil wherever…