Our Honolulu
The seeds of heritage are at risk here

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Small dramas with large consequences happen in Our Honolulu all the time, but right now Waimea Valley faces an epidemic that's worth your attention.

For 20 years everybody thought that a Hawaiian plant with an impossible scientific name, Abutilon eremitopetalum, was extinct until a botanist stumbled across a small patch on Lana'i.

Some of the seeds went to the Waimea Arboretum & Botanical Garden where the rare plant is thriving. Not to worry? Think again. Recently, a team went back to Lana'i. The patch of plants had disappeared. So may the Waimea garden.

About 20 years ago, somebody from Hawai'i collected plants in the wild on Guam and brought them to the Waimea Botanical Garden. Now that the tree snakes have taken over Guam and upset the ecology, some of the plants growing here may be extinct there.

A native hibiscus in the Waimea garden is the only species still growing in the wild in Hawai'i; five others have gone extinct. It has a green blossom the size of a thimble, bent so that the curved beak of a Hawaiian honeycreeper will fit inside to feed.

The yellow fuzz on the stamens is all on the side where the bird's forehead will brush against it, to be taken to the next flower to pollinate it. There's no more charming example of genetic evolution in the Hawaiian Islands.

One of the most romantic collections comes from the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, a Japanese archipelago 600 miles southeast of Tokyo where a haole from here took a team of Hawaiians to set up a whaling station. The whaling station went broke, but there are still descendants of the Hawaiians in the Bonins.

Also, many of the plants in the Bonins and in Hawai'i have the same ancestors.

Keith Woolliams, the horticulturalist once in charge at Waimea Arboretum, went there several times and brought back a unique collection.

David Orr, now director of the garden, keeps an envelope of seeds in the refrigerator because the local relative of the plant is extinct in Hawai'i.

"We're trying to duplicate our Guam collection at the National Tropical Botanical Garden at Lawa'i, Kaua'i, because it is the best funded and most permanent in Hawai'i and we are the most at risk," said Orr.

He listed the major botanical gardens in Hawai'i — a genetic wealth that probably can't be duplicated — as the National Tropical Botanical Garden, the University of Hawai'i's Lyon Arboretum, the city's botanical gardens and Waimea.

Waimea is financed by charitable donations, since the new owner of Waimea Falls Park stopped support. Like many plants it is trying to save, the garden itself faces an uncertain future. A $50,000 donation paid the entire staff for two years. Right now, one donor is keeping the garden alive.

But Orr, who has survived one layoff, isn't throwing in the towel. "All the gardens struggle with low budgets," he said. "This is too important to fail.