The Great Banyan
Located in the Indian Botanical Gardens, Howrah, over the River Hooghly from Kolkata, the Great Banyan was the widest tree in the world, in terms of the area of the canopy. It is estimated to be about 200 to 250 years old. It became diseased after it was struck by lightning, so in 1925 the middle of the tree was excised to keep the remainder healthy; this has left it as a clonal colony, rather than a single tree. A 330 m long road was built around its circumference, but the tree continues to spread beyond it.
There is no clear history of the tree, but it is mentioned in some travel books of the nineteenth century. It was damaged by two great cyclones in 1884 and 1886, when some of its main branches were broken and exposed to the attack of a hard fungus. With its large number of aerial roots, The Great Banyan looks more like a forest than an individual tree. The tree now lives without its main trunk, which decayed and was removed in 1925.
The really cool part of the Botanical Gardens is the great banyan tree. The whole picture, what looks like a forest, is one single tree with all its prop-roots keeping it spreading. It is still alive but the central truck has been removed as it was rotting. I thought that was pretty amazing that the tree could still be a tree without its trunk. The signboard says the tree is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the widest canopy at 1.5 hectares and with about 2880 prop-roots.
