Preserving Hawaii’s rare native plants
Credit: Ron Sullivan
Limahuli Valley on Kauai’s North Shore, with its green-mantled spires of volcanic rock, starred as Bali Hai in the movie « South Pacific. » The Limahuli Garden, one of five units of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, occupies 17 acres of this improbably gorgeous place; an additional 985 acres preserve remnant upland forest.
« Limahuli » means « turning hands. » The garden celebrates indigenous people’s ties to the land, as well as the islands’ endangered plant heritage. Its tour trail passes terraced taro (kalo) ponds, framed in lava rock at least 700 years ago and irrigated by canals diverting water from Limahuli Stream. The terraces – lo’i kalo – were part of an apupua’a, the traditional unit of land management: a pie slice with its apex in the mountains and its broad end in the sea. The system survived on Kauai into the mid-1900s.
Juliet Rice Wichman, member of a prominent Kauai family descended from New England missionaries, acquired the property in 1967 and donated the garden portion to the National Tropical Botanical Garden in 1976. Her grandson Charles « Chipper » Wichman Jr. is now the organization’s director and CEO.
The group’s mission, conserving Hawaii’s native plants, includes searching the backlands for undiscovered or forgotten species, and propagating them in a state-of-the-art facility near Poipu on the South Shore.
That’s the site of its other two Kauai gardens: the Allerton, a former private estate designed in the 1930s, and the McBryde, with native plants, « canoe plants » introduced by Polynesian voyagers – taro, ti , breadfruit, sugarcane – and palms, exotic culinary plants and ornamentals.
Unlike the McBryde, the Limahuli displays the natives in their ecological context. Short of a hike into the Alakai Swamp, Kauai’s boggy heart, the Limahuli is the best introduction to a botanical lost world.
There’s Pritchardia limahuliensis, a species of loulu – native fan palm – endemic to that single valley. Hawaii as a whole had 22 loulu species; several are now extinct. Their seeds, once dispersed by native birds, are now destroyed by introduced rats.
There’s the koki’o ke’oke’o, a delicately scented white hibiscus (Hibiscus waimeae subspecies hannerae) once thought extinct. Botanical garden researchers rediscovered the plant, which can grow 30 feet tall, in a remote part of the Limahuli Preserve in 1976.
By Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan (SFGate.com)
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