Hawai'i Gardens
A'ala garden inspiration to community
By Heidi Bornhorst
Many would love native Hawaiian plants grown all over, featured in gardens, made available in plant shops and garden events and allowed to flourish in the wild.
My husband Clark and I have a game where we walk a neighborhood and try to find the most native Hawaiian plant varieties in people's gardens.
It is always fun to see an 'ohi'a lehua, a palapalai patch or even a whole garden filled with the subtle silvery foliage and modest flowers of native Hawaiian plants.
Veteran gardeners and Hawaiian naturalists, like John Obata and Lorrin Gill, have long appreciated, grown and nurtured native plants.
Some of us have been trying to grow them for years, even when told things like "You sure make them look good with your macro lens. Or, you know Heidi, native plants are just a fad."
It is always good to see native Hawaiian plants — right where they belong — growing in Hawai'i gardens.
Lorrin Gill called me the other dayto tell me of a garden at the Hawaii Federal Credit Union building on A'ala Street.
It is full of vigorous native plants, he said. Gill is a longtime mentor and kupuna to many of us, so I heeded his advice and walked over to A'ala Street on my lunch break.
This garden is inspirational. That it is the talk of the native Hawaiian gardening community comes as no surprise.
The garden was planted and is diligently cared for almost daily by two brothers: Bill and Mitsuo Tamashiro.
Bill works on the garden and learns all about native plants. Sometimes he gets discouraged when people steal his liko or when a plant dies or doesn't do well. But he keeps planting, always learning along the way.
Many of Bill's challenges are similar to what the home gardener faces. The soil is bad. The Tamashiro's garden is on the old Toyo Theater parking lot. The day I stopped by for a visit, he was preparing a new planting hole. The hole was full of coral chunks with asphalt and other 'opala mixed in. Because the topsoil is clay, he adds a lot of compost and organic matter.
The garden has a lush lawn of seashore paspalum grass. He uses black plastic edging to protect the roots and trunks of the plants and to make lawn mowing, edging and other maintenance tasks easier to accomplish.
This is a great technique in any garden.
This will allow you to fertilize and top-dress your valuable plants without wasting fertilizer on grass and weeds.
Walk up to the garden and you are greeted by the bright yellow 'ilima and ko'oko'olau.
Many native trees and shrubs including Hala, 'ohi'a lehua and 'ohe 'ohe proudly stand on the verdant lawn.
The brothers are constantly adding new plants and improving on what is there now. They plan to label the plants so school children can identify the numerous species in the garden whenever they come to visit.
They use bacopa, a low-growing indigenous shoreline plant with subtle flowers, as ground cover. There are striking hala trees surrounded by ferns, protecting the hala against weed trimmers and sprayers. Maile, naio, koki'a, Ohi'a and 'ilima are growing near the entry. Artemesia, or hinahina is used as a silvery ground cover.
