The Limahuli Garden on the north shore of Kauai features 700-year-old terraces for growing taro, known as loi kalo. One of three Kauai sites of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, it features a variety of plants native to the islands. At their headquarters on the Garden Isle, resident scientists face the challenge of snatching the Pacific islands' quickly disappearing plants from the brink of extinction. CLICK FOR LARGE
Kauai gardens saving unique beauty
Three sites on Kauai help preserve plants that would otherwise be extinct in nature
KALAHEO, Kauai » Working in a botanical garden might seem to offer mainly quiet days of watering and pruning.
But at National Tropical Botanical Garden headquartered on Kauai, resident scientists face the challenge of snatching Pacific islands' quickly disappearing plants from the brink of extinction.
One adventure included a careful trek over ordnance-riddled Kahoolawe to find the last two representatives of an ancient plant.
GET INTO THE GARDEN
Introductory "Discovery" memberships in the National Tropical Botanical Garden cost $20 and include two passes for self-guided tours of its McBryde, Limahuli and Kahanu gardens; subscription to The Bulletin magazine published for garden supporters; a 10 percent discount at garden shops; and invitations to local events, workshops, and lectures. The garden headquarters phone on Kauai is (808) 332-7324, extension 246
On the Net:
National Tropical Botanical Garden: www.ntbg.org
Like botanical detectives, other scientists sort through species to unlock the mysteries of plants with possible curative powers, sometimes working with traditional island healers.
And when samples of these elusive exemplars are finally safe in the garden's labs, researchers must then solve the riddle of their reproduction. Each plant is valued as a possible key to the survival of other species, part of the balance of nature with unknown biological potential.
And you thought botanical gardens were only about pretty flowers?
"Most of our visitors to Hawaii look at this beautiful, lush landscape and they just think, 'It's paradise,' " said Charles R. "Chipper" Wichman, garden director, gesturing to the verdant valley stretching out below his office window on Kauai. "They have no idea that what they are viewing is a war zone between our native plants that are trying to hold on to a space and all these invasive plants and animals that are trying to take it away from them."
The garden has set itself up as something like a leader in a native plant resistance movement.
Though created by an act of Congress in 1964, the garden isn't annually allocated government funds and instead depends on private donations and grants from public and private foundations. It covers 1,800 acres, including five botanical gardens and three preserves, all but one of which -- The Kampong in southern Florida -- are located in Hawaii.
The Garden Isle is home to the garden's headquarters, where it is building a new, environmentally sensitive botanical research center. The island also has three of the garden's sites, which are open to the public and provide a way for visitors in Hawaii to get off the beach and learn more about the islands.
Each of the gardens is unique and requires at least an hour or two to take in properly.
The Limahuli Garden on the lush North Shore features many native species and stunning 700-year-old terraces for growing taro.
At Kauai's Limahuli Garden, a blossom of an ohia lehua tree soaks in the sunshine. CLICK FOR LARGE
On the drier South Shore, a tram ride in into the Lawa'i Valley brings visitors to two very different gardens. The McBryde Garden nurtures plants from throughout the tropics, some of which are extinct in the wild. Next door, the formal Allerton Garden was begun by Hawaii's Queen Emma in the late 1800s and transformed into its current design by a scion of a wealthy Chicago family who purchased the land in the late 1930s.
The National Tropical Botanical Garden's three primary missions are conservation, research and education.
Widely known as the nation's "extinction capital," the Hawaiian islands present a wealth of conservation needs. About 180 plant species in Hawaii have 50 or fewer individuals living in the wild, Wichman said.
"We are facing an extinction crisis here in the Hawaiian Islands. And the plants here are part of our national heritage, part of the United States' national heritage," he said.
Conservation at the garden involves locating and identifying endangesred plants, raising them in green houses and then reintroducing them in the gardens and elsewhere to reconstruct native plant environments and bolster the health of the islands' many other troubled species.
Getting the community involved, such as mass plantings elsewhere on the island by the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, is another part of the effort.
"People in the end will only conserve that which they love. And they only love that which they are familiar with and that which they know," Wichman said.
Among the garden's conservation and research triumphs is the alula, on display at both the McBryde and Limahuli gardens on Kauai. Similar in appearance to a cabbage on a stick, the cute, stocky little plant has been grown by the hundreds in the garden. But only one known alula remains in the wild, tucked away on a cliff on Kauai.
Not all the garden's tales are so simple or triumphant as the alula's. The world's only known wild kanaloa, a humble-looking member of the pea family first scientifically described in 1994, lives on a sea stack off Kahoolawe, an uninhabited island still sprinkled with unexploded bombs after being used for target practice by the military for five decades.
Guided across the small island by people trained in ordnance detection, two of the garden's collectors spotted two of the unique plants on a tiny lump of offshore land topped by a piece of native vegetation that had been isolated for centuries from the human-introduced ravages of rats, grazing sheep, farming and bombs.
The collectors were able to gather samples of the plant after perilously lowering themselves down on ropes. Subsequent visits to the spot have been made by helicopter.
"To find plants are sometimes very unusual coincidence," noted David H. Lorence, director of science at the garden, who co-authored the paper first describing the newly discovered plant.
A lone example of this shrub grown from a seed is rooted in a tub, cordoned off from the public at the spot where the McBryde Garden and Allerton Garden meet. But so far researchers haven't found a way to produce any more of the enigmatic plant that ancient pollen records suggest was one of the dominant species here for a couple thousand years until the mid-1500s.
In all, the garden has had a hand in the discovery of 30 new species endemic to Hawaii and the rediscovery of about another 30 thought to be extinct.
But the garden has more in its sights on the research front than reproduction. It also has an Institute for Ethnomedicine through which the garden discovered, with the help of traditional Samoan healers, a potential anti-HIV drug currently in clinical trials.
If the drug proves to be marketable, the Samoan government as well as the village where it was found and the family of the healer who helped find it will get a good portion of the royalties, Wichman said.
"Our goal is to really try and set the standard for how to work with indigenous people and honor their intellectual property rights," he said.