A. Manele is a tough and pretty tree that is also appealing to lei makers and landscape designers. Native Hawaiian wiliwili is another tough, pretty and useful tree. Lonomea, or O'ahu soapberry, endemic to O'ahu and Kaua'i, is another winner.

Manele or Sapindus saponaria is a tree indigenous to Hawai'i. It is also called the Hawaiian soapberry. Manele has shiny, pinnately arranged leaves.

It is in the lychee and 'a'ali'i family and has small, inconspicuous flowers and rewarding fruits.

Manele fruit have a shiny, winkled orange-brown thin fruit layer encasing the shiny, hard round black seed inside. The fruit part will lather up and makes nice soap for fine washables. The seed is made into a prized lei.

Manele is a very adaptable tree. It grows well in the severe conditions of Ala Moana Beach Park (high brackish water table, charcoal burns, Weed Eater wounds, poor urban soil, etc.). In our lowland conditions, the trees are about 30 feet tall.

In more mauka, cool conditions, manele is a larger, rounder tree. In Wahiawa, there is a nice old tree that is about 40 feet tall and just as wide. It is a nice round shape here, while at Ala Moana it is a more columnar, thinner tree.

In ideal conditions up near Volcano on the Big Island, at about 4,000 feet elevation, the manele are gorgeous and magnificent. They are round-headed and full-headed trees 60-feet and taller. They grow amidst the koa and mamane here, and rival the koa in height and majesty.

This is a Hawaiian tree that we should definitely grow, nurture and plant more of in our urban forests.

• Clarification: Koa, our native Hawaiian forest giant, grows best at elevations above 2,000 feet. The level reported in this column two weeks ago was wrong. At lower elevations, more pests attack koa trees.

Experts may be able to find and nurture clones of koa that do thrive in the lowlands.

Also take into account soil types and organic matter and other factors that would affect koa trees.