Lei Garden
The lei garden consists of plants that produce flowers, seeds, and leaves that include color, fragrance, lasting quality, and rarity for lei making.
Today, in Hawai`i, the lei is a symbol of friendship, love, and trust. It is offered as a gift of honor to friends and visitors. The connection to its origins goes back to Southern Asia, after many hundred of years of migrating form island to island eastward across the vast Pacific Ocean, bringing with them the arts and traditions of the lei which generations before them had developed on the continent of their origin. The materials of lei making were substituted, the reasons for and the rituals of the lei suffered changes also as people moved form place to place. A greater and richer variety of leis was made in Hawai`i at this time than in any other Polynesian group. Most plants in this garden bloom profusely in March and September.
The ornamental hibiscus hybrids are the best known, but there is great diversity and beauty in these wild hibiscus species and their relatives, which include cotton and okra. Of all the different hibiscus species in the world, only the two white flowered endemics (Koki`o ke`oke`o) found in Hawai`i have a fragrance. There are about 300 species from tropical and sub-tropical areas.
Fruit, Nut, Spice
While we expect tropical fruit to grow on trees, there are a large number, which come from shrubs and even herbs.
In this garden, there are well-known fruits like mango, guava, and papaya, along with custard apple and rukam, which are equally tasty but not as well known. There is the jackfruit, which grows quite large and can weigh up to 40 pounds. And, a delicious fruit called durian, which has an obnoxious smell.
There are also a few subtropical nut and spice trees that grow here, such as the macadamia nut and the Brazilian chestnut trees. Please come to the garden to smell the spice trees and guess what they are before reading the labels mounted on the trees.
Amaryllidaceae
This plant family has over 1,100 species, but the Crinum, or spider lilies, are especially favored in this garden. Efforts are underway to preserve many of the unusual and rare plants, and already this collection is one of the largest in the world.
Central & South America
This floral area includes the vast Amazonian rain forest, the savannahs of Argentina, the high plains of the Andes, the coastal jungles of the Caribbean, and the deserts of Chile, Peru and Mexico. The number of plant species in this range of habitats is so great that botanists have no actual count!
There are important edible, medicinal, and economic plants in Central and South America, but vast areas are being destroyed by man’s search for timber and natural resources such as gold and oil. New roads are opening remote areas for colonization, and primary forests are being short-sightedly cleared for cattle ranches.
Entire plant communities are being disrupted, and large numbers of species are rapidly dying out before they can be studied.
Chocolate, Vanilla, Peppers, Rubber, Tomatoes, and Potatoes all come from this part of the world. Botanists are racing against time to study equally promising, but little known plants facing extinction. Among them are medicinal plants used by native cultures, nutritious food crops that can tolerate drought and poor soils, even trees that yield sap like diesel oil.
Ogasawara
This remote group of about 31 islands and rocks, located 600 miles south/southwest of Tokyo are at about the same latitude as Hawai`i. Students of Hawaiian evolutionary botany learn much from the similar flora of the (almost uninhabited) Ogasawara Bonin Islands.
The climate is comparable to the lowlands of Hawai‘i but with a rainy season from April to July. There are some similarities in flora, including 26 species from the Ogasawara Islands, which have relatives within the Hawaiian flora. The location of the islands provides an interesting mixture of temperate Asian and tropical Pacific plants, There are nearly 400 species and 46 percent are endemic, meaning they are not found elsewhere in the world.
There were many unsuccessful attempts to colonize the islands since the mid-16th century. In 1830, a ship from Hawai‘i landed a crew of 20 Hawaiians and 7 Europeans, where they settled under the British flag. The British finally relinquished their claim when these islands became a part of Japan in 1875.
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