Posted on: Thursday, July 18, 2002

Shorn trees to recover fully, state official says

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

O'ahu Airports Manager Stanford Miyamoto said yesterday three monkeypod trees whose pruning shocked nature lovers will grow back completely in two years.

Miyamoto said the trees in the Culture Garden courtyard of Honolulu International Airport were pruned because their branches were extending to buildings, including windows and concourses, and posed a safety problem. In addition, he said, large amount of leaves falling from the trees were causing problems with pond maintenance.

But he said he regretted that the trees were stripped bare, acknowledging that "perhaps we should have trimmed them gradually, a portion of the tree at a time."

He got that tip from state Department of Education arborist Pat Oka, who called Miyamoto when he saw newspaper accounts of the cutting.

Oka said yesterday that the leaves will begin to reappear in two months and that the trees will be filled out again in two years. He said the trees technically had not been "topped," as critics said, because that would have cut all branches back to within a few inches of the trunk.

The problem, Oka said, was not one of horticulture so much as aesthetic perception and emotions. It was unfortunate that the tree crews didn't foresee the visual impact their work would have in one of the first landscape views in Hawai'i to be seen by millions of visitors every year.

The better course would have been to trim a third of a tree's branches, then come back six to eight months later to do another third, and so on, Oka said.

Miyamoto said he will meet today with Mary Steiner, head of the Outdoor Circle and one of the first people to criticize the cutting, to make sure his staff has the latest information on pruning and maintenance without risking either the health of trees or their looks.