(Not so) Wordless Wednesday - The Banyan Tree.

 

The Banyan tree, La Haina, Maui, Hawaii.

It seems incredible that what looks like a group of trees is in fact all one!

Enormous is no understatement here: Spanning 1.94 acres—over the length of a city block—and rising more than 60 feet in the air, Lahaina’s famed banyan tree is a quarter of a mile in circumference and possesses 16 trunks, making it the largest banyan tree not only in Hawaii but also in the United States (and one of the most massive in the world).

While remnants of the town’s conflicted past remains—Lahaina is at once raucous and refined, booming with the gutsy spirit of its past residents—its early 19th century soul is best represented in the banyan tree itself, which matured with the help of a local Japanese gardening society and other Maui residents, who hung jars of waters on its roots. A member of the fig tree family—of which there are 60 types in Hawaii—Lahaina’s banyan tree’s root system is, in every sense of the word, a marvel: Descending from its branches, aerial roots drape towards the ground, where they take root, thicken, and form new trunks that allow the tree to grow vertically and horizontally, giving it a skulking look that brings to mind Southern Gothic. (To the outside observer, larger banyan trees—including Lahaina’s—appear to comprise several separate trees.)

I am joining Sandee at Comedy Plus for the blog hop.