In 1911, a young Austrian named Joseph Rock was hired as a botanist by the then-fledgling College of Hawai‘i. An adventurer and arborist both, Rock started planting trees. Within a few years, he’d planted hundreds of species on campus, wild beautiful trees from Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific: a baobab, a sausage tree, a sandbox tree, exotic immigrants that had never before rooted into Hawaiian soil. He had seed from everywhere, and with it he created an international collective that began to spread its branches out over the new university.
In 1920 Rock headed to China, but the planting continued, and the university’s botanical family grew larger still. Even the King of Siam is rumored to have gotten in on the act; it’s said that he planted the chaulmoogra tree that now grows by Bachman Hall. Today the UH Mänoa campus is one of the Islands’ best places to wander—ignore the largely dull architecture and enter a wonderland of flora that for nearly 100 years has welcomed visitors from the smallest sparrows to Nobel Prize winners. Some of the trees have names that sound straight out of fairy tales: jack-in-the-box trees, purple trumpet trees, coral shower trees, double buttercup trees. There are the more utilitarian but still impressive teak, mahogany and tamarind trees. There is a cannonball tree planted by Thornton Wilder in 1933 when he was a visiting professor at the university. Everywhere you look, you find something unique and special: a sun sapote tree behind Sinclair Library that throws baseball-like grey pods from its branches, a scarlet flame bean tree by Hemenway Hall that tosses vibrant orange pompon blossoms to the ground.
I first met these trees when I entered UH as a freshman in the 1980s. They were daily companions for four years, and I felt lucky to be studying in a place where I was constantly surrounded by them. How many students find a majestic ficus beside the financial aid office, a weeping fig out their dorm window, a Mexican fan palm next to the campus radio station? Everyone in higher ed talks about academic rankings but what, I wondered, about botanical ones? I felt sure UH would rank at the top. (Years later, in graduate school at Stanford, I missed UH’s trees acutely; Stanford had its dramatic palm drive, but overall its trees were, like the institution itself, stiff and aloof. Only the oaks, with their twisty questing branches, seemed interested in exploring the poetry of life.) Now when I go back to visit UH’s trees, I find the scent of a flower or the color of a leaf will often evoke a memory so strong it seems impossible that the moment is not actually occurring again. As old as they are, these trees have a way of making me feel very young again. They are calm and unshakeable, and, like the best teachers, filled with a strength they always share.
Rock died in 1962. He was expelled from China by Mao’s government and spent his last years back in the Islands, planting more trees on campus. By Sinclair, you can find the Joseph Rock Memorial Tree, a bamuyo tree he is said to have carried as a seedling all the way back from Indonesia—on his lap on the plane. The university continues to grow, and it celebrates its centennial this year. But, ironically, that growth has not been easy on the trees: There are many more buildings on campus now than there were in Rock’s time and there are plans for many more—which means trees will either be cut down or, if they’re lucky, transplanted. Next to the Student Services Building stands a tree that is significant not just as a marker of the past but also, perhaps, of the future. It is a bo tree planted in 1912 by the university’s first graduating class, a great-grandchild of the actual tree under which the Buddha is said to have received enlightenment. It used to be a government-designated “exceptional tree,” but it lost that status after it was severely pruned in the early 1990s to make way for the building. Still, the bo stands, hemmed in, cut back, but rooted and growing nonetheless, a living reminder of the gift of knowledge—and the ever-possible opening of wisdom.