banyan, kapiolani park

A few photos of an enormous banyan tree in Honolulu's Kapiolani Park. I probably ought to have used the wide angle lens here, or at least taken a few photos from further away, since I never managed to fit the whole tree into a shot. I was more interested in the crazy vine-like details of the tree anyway, but it would have helped to have a sort of establishing shot to start with. Oh well. You can probably find photos of complete banyan trees somewhere on the interwebs, if you really need an establishing shot.



Until just now I had no idea banyan trees and strangler figs are one and the same thing. I vaguely remember reading some sort of "life in the jungle" nature book as a kid that went on about the strangler fig, presenting it as a sort of shadowy, sinister jungle plant. The author seemed especially incensed that the strangler fig tended to benefit from the hard work of honest upstanding trees, and generally lacked a proper Protestant work ethic. The book failed to mention the fact that it grows into an even bigger tree, one whose English name comes from the Gujarati word for "merchant" (as a large banyan provides enough shade that you can set up shop beneath it). You'd think that would have been a point in the tree's favor, but it would have been an inconvenient detail in the simple tale of good straight-n-tall trees vs. evil freeloading commie trees.



I kept thinking that the name "Banyan" had geek connotations too but I couldn't place it immediately. What I was thinking of was the old Banyan VINES network operating system from the mid 1980s & early 1990s, which apparently was a set of file & directory services running on top of a mutant flavor of SVR3 Unix (which you the customer weren't allowed to touch directly). I never saw it firsthand; conventional wisdom held that it was superior to whatever flavor of NetWare was current back then, but everyone bought NetWare anyway. It was supposed to be the "standard", and it was a lot easier to find & hire Novell CNEs than whatever the Banyan equivalent was. And then Windows NT and the interwebs came along and killed off the whole NOS market. So a little bit of obscure retrotech history here, with no relation to the rest of this post except for the name. FWIW. Mostly because I can't think of much of anything else to say about the actual tree.