Planting Back the Shade
Treecovery Hawaiʻi is rebuilding the canopy of Lāhainā and Kula, then looking beyond the burn zone.
by Chris Amundson
photograph by Selket Kaufman
Treecovery Hawaiʻi plants and tends trees to restore Mauiʻs ecosystems.
Under the porte cochere at Andaz Maui at Wailea, a banyan air layer comes through the morning light in a black nursery pot.
Two people grip the rim while others follow through the filtered light, past stone, timber and the open lobby, toward the spot where the tree will rest for now. The leaves catch the light. Fine roots show at the base of the pot. Around them, hotel staff and Treecovery Hawaiʻi volunteers wait for the placement, the blessing and the planting that follows.
This banyan came from Lāhainā, from the damaged edges of the town’s most famous tree after the August 8, 2023, fires burned away not only homes and businesses, but shade, fruit and the canopy that had long shaped daily life. Treecovery Hawaiʻi was founded in that aftermath to provide free trees to people in Lāhainā and Kula who lost them, but it quickly expanded into something larger – a distributed effort to rebuild canopy across Maui, one grow hub, one yard and one planting at a time.
The banyan is only part of the morning. After the placement comes a brief blessing. Then volunteers move to the soil pile and stacks of empty pots, where they begin transplanting young trees that will eventually leave Wailea for Lāhainā or Kula. Shovels bite into soil. Root balls thump into place. Pot tags are pressed in. Water darkens the dirt. Kimo Simpliciano, Treecovery’s operations manager, tells the group how it works. When a family or public site calls and says it is ready, he says, Treecovery goes into its data bank, looks up the trees set aside for that address and sends them out. “Yes, we have your trees,” he tells them.
The hard part is time.
photograph by Selket Kaufman
At Lāhainā Harbor, loulu palms planted by Treecovery Hawaiʻi take root along the shoreline as the town continues to rebuild in the background. The plantings begin to restore shade, habitat and a sense of daily life to the waterfront.
Houses can be designed, permitted and built on a construction schedule. Trees move slower. A mango takes years. Shade takes years. A yard takes time to come back. Treecovery lives in that gap, growing trees while homes, public spaces and neighborhoods wait for the right moment to receive them.
For Matthew Murasko, one of Treecovery’s founders, the banyan rescue became the first proof of concept. After the fire, he and Duane Sparkman, an arborist and chief engineer at the Royal Lahaina Resort & Bungalows, were pulled into the urgent effort around the Lāhainā banyan. They did not know if it would survive.
So they air-layered branches from the mother tree, wrapping exposed sections so roots would form while the branches were still attached. When they returned, the roots were already pushing through. Fourteen air layers were removed and sent to resorts around the island, including the Fairmont Kea Lani, where they continue to grow under Treecovery Hawaiʻi’s stewardship while Maui County determines their long-term placement. “Let’s bring the banyan tree to the resort,” Murasko said.
FOR MONTHS after the fire, people wanted to see the banyan and could not get into the burn zone. The resort air layers became an early answer: living pieces of the tree set where people could see them while the original fought its way back.
Murasko still talks about them as insurance, branches grown out in case the mother tree was lost. Treecovery Hawaiʻi and its resort partners are now stewarding those air layers while Maui County determines their long-term placement.
But Treecovery did not stop with the banyan.
photograph by Treecovery Hawaiʻi
Rows of young trees like kamani, naio, koaiʻa and plumeria line a grow hub in Ukumehame.
What followed was a network of grow hubs across the island. Treecovery’s first resort grow hub opened with fruit tree saplings at Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club, and the network has since spread to West Maui, Wailea, Kahului Airport and private properties in other parts of the island. At each site, trees are watered, weeded, re-potted and held until a family, park, harbor or street project is ready to receive them. Some hubs are resort courtyards. Others are parking lots lined with black nursery pots. Others are back fields turned into temporary nurseries.
At some grow hubs, rows of black pots sit on ground cloth under a hard blue sky, edged by dry grass and wind-bent palms. At others, the trees line up beside orange traffic cones and chain-link fence. Treecovery has spread its grow hubs into courtyards, parking lots and back fields. This is not resort landscaping. It’s nursery labor.
Before they reach Lāhainā, the trees have to survive somewhere else.
Over an hour from Lāhainā, at a private Upcountry property, David Clements has turned part of his farm into an acclimation ground for trees from rainy East Maui. At one point, he was tending as many as 1,600 potted trees there, adjusting them to sunnier, drier conditions before the final move west. Among them were sections of the Lāhainā banyan, along with wiliwili and other species transitioning to a drier climate. Without that step, many would struggle in the hotter, drier conditions in West Maui.
The focus also shifts to what returns to Lāhainā – and what kind of landscape returns with it.
Sparkman sees the project as more than replacement. He speaks not just about putting trees back, but about changing what is planted and why – more native species, more flowering trees, more fruit trees, more landscape that reflects Lāhainā’s older relationship to food, lei and shade. “We’re a group of healers,” he says at one point. “As we restore the ʻāina, it restores us.”
photograph by Treecovery Hawaiʻi
Evan and Val Cox host a grow hub in Launiupoko.
Treecovery is also using the rebuild to change what Lāhainā looks like. Sparkman has described the chance to replace decades of imported ornamentals with species that belong more fully to Hawaiʻi. In public spaces, that means fewer generic tropical display trees and more native Hawaiian plantings.
One example is the loulu, the native Hawaiian fan palm. At Lāhainā Harbor, Treecovery has helped install loulu palms grown for years in Kula from seed originally collected on Molokaʻi.
For Sparkman, the point is simple: the next canopy should come closer to Maui Nui itself.
Treecovery’s palette runs from banyan to mango, citrus, banana and papaya, with native and culturally important species also part of the mix – wiliwili, breadfruit and trees used in lei making or habitat restoration. Some are chosen for shade, some for food and some because they belong more fully to Maui than the imported ornamentals that filled many spaces before the fire.
Sparkman has described a future Lāhainā that looks less like a string of decorative plantings and more like a layered island town with fruit, flowers and usable shade built back into daily life.
Murasko sees Lāhainā and Kula as only the first phase.
Murasko doesn’t talk about the current phase as an endpoint. Replacing trees in Lāhainā and Kula is phase one. After that, he wants the project to move outward. He talks about land in Central Maui that could hold both a food forest and a tree donation farm, where Treecovery could make its own soil, grow its own stock and keep planting beyond the fire footprint. He points to the brown stretches below the wetter uplands, where tree cover faded over time and, in his view, could return.
photograph by Chris Amundson
At Andaz Maui, a banyan air layer is carefully set into a pot, beginning its next stage of growth.
He talks about planting trees for children on Maui who haven’t yet been born.
As the conversation turns toward what comes after Lāhainā is replanted, Murasko broadens the mission to Maui Nui – not just Maui, but Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe as well. In his telling, canopy loss didn’t begin with August 8 and won’t end with replacing what burned.
Then the numbers start to add up. The organization’s own counts have shifted as the project has grown: many thousands of trees lost, thousands already potted and a long horizon ahead. Murasko has cited an Army Corps count of roughly 21,000 trees burned in Lāhainā’s 300-acre burn zone. Those trees provided backyard fruit, street shade, lei material and habitat – things that don’t come back with gravel and new drywall.
At the Andaz, after the banyan air layer is carried into place, Kimo Simpliciano tells the volunteers that guests may someday come back and visit the trees they helped pot up. That opens up the map. Hotels in Wailea are growing trees for Lāhainā. Airport courtyards are becoming nurseries. Private farms are hardening off young plants for hotter, drier ground. When a public site is ready, a tree in the system is ready for it.
Here, recovery means planting before the rebuilding is over.
By the end of the Andaz event, the volunteers are back in the soil, the stack of empty pots is lower and the banyan is in place under the resort’s heavy beams. It is still young enough to look vulnerable and old enough to show where it came from. It is not home. Not yet.
But it is alive, putting on leaves in Wailea while it continues to grow under Treecovery Hawaiʻi’s stewardship.
Ashes to Art to Trees
photograph by Treecovery Hawaiʻi
Using salvaged wood from burn zones, artists Dale Zarrella and Steve Grimes create sculptures and instruments, with proceeds supporting Treecovery Hawaiʻi
In the months after the August 8 fires, burned logs from Lāhainā and Kula began to collect in staging areas – blackened, split and often hollowed out. For Treecovery Hawaiʻi, they became part of the same recovery effort as the trees now growing in pots across the island.
The organization has partnered with a small group of artists and makers to transform that material into sculpture, functional pieces and musical instruments. The wood comes directly from the burn zone, and the marks of the fire remain visible in the finished work.
Among the first to engage was sculptor Dale Zarrella, who began carving forms from salvaged logs, letting the grain and damage shape each piece. Other Maui-based artists have followed, including Upcountry luthier Steve Grimes, who builds high-end acoustic guitars and ʻukulele. Working from his shop on Maui, Grimes has incorporated recovered wood into instruments that are sold to collectors and players, with proceeds supporting Treecovery’s work.
Other pieces are placed where people will encounter them – resort properties, public spaces and Kahului Airport. At the airport, a large-format installation includes an augmented reality layer that opens to short video messages from Treecovery’s team and provides a direct path to learn more or contribute.
Sales and donations tied to the artwork support Treecovery’s primary work: growing and delivering free trees to families in Lāhainā and Kula as they rebuild.
Leadership includes founder and president Duane Sparkman, co-founder and board secretary Matthew Murasko, board members Ekolu Lindsey and Rodger May, operations manager Kimo Simpliciano, cultural advisor Archie Kalepa and legal advisor Tom Pierce.
