When fire swept through Lahaina on Aug. 8, 2023, the banyan tree on Front Street remained standing, shielding the buildings behind it from the flames.
Only a small portion of the tree trunk caught fire, and that’s because it was near a post that caught fire, Duane Sparkman, chair of the Maui County Arborist Committee, told Aloha State Daily this summer.
ASD met Sparkman, also the founder of Treecovery Hawai‘i, on Maui in June, ahead of the third anniversary of the fire, which killed more than 100 people and destroyed much of Lahaina town.
And while it survived the fire, the banyan, planted more than 150 years ago, was dried out by the ambient heat from the inferno engulfing neighboring buildings.
All of that heat, says Sparkman, “was basically microwaving the tree; it was cooking the tree.”
According to the arborist, the banyan itself saved the harbor bathrooms behind it, blocking the heat and the brunt force of the fire, and stopping the flames from reaching the building.
Today, the banyan is still on the mend, and will be for a while.
Sparkman told ASD that following an assessment with arborists in May, it was decided to keep the banyan fenced off for another two years.
“It’s going to be two years of healing still for that tree,” he says. “It really needs it. It does. It’s hard to say how truly damaged the inside of the tree is because the species that it is can literally wrap itself around the branches and start to heal itself. But we’re nervous about the interior heartwood of the tree, so if that heartwood is at all damaged by borer beetles or twig borers, then we have a problem and it becomes fragile, then the public’s at risk, so we have to wait. But that's OK. It needs it.”
These trees can live to be 1,000-plus years old, Sparkman says, so at 153 years old, “it’s still a baby and it just went through a fire, so let’s give it a break.”
Although the tree is fenced off, you can still view it from the street. On a recent walk along Front Street, there were a number of visitors stopping to take a look — from a respectable distance, of course.
Sparkman says that by keeping the tree closed to the public for two more years, "it'll allow that tree to not be climbed on. It'll allow that tree to set aerial roots into the soil and pull more nutrients and heal faster. Those are the No. 1 factors. There's less compaction from human interaction, so the roots can actually heal faster and distributes nutrient throughout the tree faster. So, there's a lot of reasons why we want to keep people out of it."
He said, too the tree had "a lot of scars" from people carving into it, "so we know that's going to come back, and our thing is to reduce that for a while, let that healing go throughout the tree, all the way up into the upper canopy. It is still 56 feet tall. [The fire] didn't burn the tree. The tree is completely alive, so the whole entire canopy is regrowing. It's just this upper canopy is growing much slower than the lower canopy, and since we're seeing that, that's what makes us [say], 'OK, we're going to slow down access to the public.'"
Since the fires, more than a dozen "air layers" have been pulled from the tree, some of which are on display at Maui resorts. While Sparkman says that the original intent was to plant them back into the park, "we don't know what we're going to do with them. They don't belong to me. They don't belong to Treecovery. They belong to all of us in Maui County. We pay our taxes and the taxes maintain the tree, so they're public assets."
When asked if this is where he thought the recovery of the banyan would be three years post-fire, Sparkman says he had "no idea" and has no expectations, having never been through this experience before.
According to Historic Hawai‘i Foundation, the banyan was planted on April 24, 1873, by Sheriff William Owen Smith. The sapling was a gift from missionaries in India and was planted to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Protestant mission in Lahaina, HHF notes.
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Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.
