Research Garden DesignBrowse photos, get design ideas & see the hottest plants
On the mainland , celebrity get a Hollywood star ; in Hawai’i , it ’s a tree onBanyan Drive . I repulse through the trees on a recent visit to the island , dashing out of the elevator car to stand under the loom trees and shoot the painted nameplates . Hawai’ian landscapes are fix by their plant , and so it ’s entirely meet that the island catalogs its ace with this typewriter ribbon of trees . Winding along the coast in Hilo , a metropolis on the lucullan , eastern side of Hawai’i ’s Big Island , Banyan Drive is an archipelago of banyan fig trees , each with a brass to honor a celebrated person . In most lawsuit , the trees were planted by the celebrities themselves .
Mostly planted in the 1930s , ' 40s , and ' 50s , they record a sort of notable people : American movie stars , Hawaiian royalty , and assorted explorers and politicians . The canopied path weave through fancy hotels and a golf course , and begins just past an imposing bronze statue of Hawai’i ’s worship King Kamehameha the Great . Banyans are not native to Hawai’i — but , like many flora on the islands , they were introduced so many years ago that they have become naturalized , and are now a outstanding feature of the landscape .
Franklin D. Roosevelt , 1934 ( left ) ; George Herman " Babe " Ruth , 1933 ( right ) . exposure by : Anna Laurent
The tradition start in 1933 , when Cecil B. DeMille , film a Hollywood icon on location in Hawai’i , planted a banyan tree by the water . President Franklin D. Roosevelt added one on his sojourn to the island in 1934 . The island escort the beginnings of a keen custom , and , over the next four years , forty novel Ficus bengalensis were engraft . Notably , Amelia Earhart planted a Indian banyan in 1935 , several days before she launch the first solo flight across the Pacific Ocean . Of the others , some are major whizz on an international stage — Louis Armstrong , Babe Ruth , Richard Nixon — and some are minor histrion , locally extolled — Hawaiian princess Abigail Kawananakoa , vulcanologist Thomas Jaggar , hotelier William Kimi .
They are tremendous specimens , wide and tall , with tiers of aerial roots that descend towards the earth , cloak their arm like commemorative garlands . Individually , each the tree is an telling tribute to its respective famous person ; together , the banyans form a wholesale canopy that creates the effect of a memorial tunnel . Several of the banyan have fall over the age — tidal wafture casualties in Hilo , know as the " tsunami majuscule of the United States . " Today , Banyan Drive includes fifty Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree — lowering their roots , and maintain a lovely custom .
Mr. & Mrs. Otto Rose , 1935 . photograph by : Anna Laurent
Franklin D. Roosevelt , 1934 ( go out ) ; George Herman " Babe " Ruth , 1933 ( right ) . picture credit : Anna Laurent
Anna Laurent is a writer and photographer . Herworkexplores how we look at plants , and how those flora behave .
