Island Excursion
On safari in Honolulu's urban oasis

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer

Volunteer guide Sheila Lo, far right, offers visitors insight into Foster Botanical Garden. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser Foster Botanical Garden Open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. daily; guided tours at 1 p.m. weekdays $5 ($3 kama'aina with ID); $1 children ages 6-12 522-7060 Also: The Friends of Honolulu Botanical Garden Annual Fall Plant Sale, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday at Foster Garden. Free admission and self-guided tours.

Not to Joni Mitchell's Edenic "Woodstock" to "join in a rock 'n' roll band," but to downtown Honolulu for a tour of Foster Botanical Garden.

A painful assignment? Hardly. Trouble is, there was little for me to get back to because I'd never been to Foster Garden in my 17 years on O'ahu. In fact, I didn't even know where the parking entrance was when I checked in recently for one of the garden's guided tours.

More than the city's own little backyard garden, Foster is a lush 13.5-acre open-air Louvre of endangered and not-so-endangered tropical and subtropical plants from around the world. Procured over the last 140 years, the garden's diverse collection of flora thrives somewhat comfortably on a history-steeped property bordered by Nu'uanu Avenue and Stream, Vineyard Boulevard and the H-1 Freeway.

The Thursday afternoon tour group I found myself in numbered just four — three docent guides-in-training and yours truly. No matter. Two-year veteran volunteer guide Sheila Lo proved an enthusiastically quick-on-the-pace fountain of Foster knowledge, alternately pulling up errant weeds, foraging for interesting visuals and sharing just enough information to encourage return visits for continued self-exploration.

Beginning the tour at a towering bo tree, Lo explains that the specimen before us was propagated from a Sri Lankan bo first planted in 288 B.C., itself propagated from the Indian tree under which Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment around A.D. 500. The tree is one of 25 in the garden protected by state law.

After pausing momentarily in the Croton Terrace's gazebo, where artists survey etchings and watercolors created earlier in the day, Lo ushers us to the freeway-bordering Lyon Orchid Garden and its collection of wild varieties.

Foster Garden, which once bordered School Street on its mauka side, lost more than five acres to H-1 construction in the late 1950s — one of a number of land gains and losses the property has tallied over its 80 years as a private residence and 70 years as a public garden. Lo laments how heat generated by automobiles speeding by just 75 feet or so below us has reduced the wild orchid collection's numbers and colors over the years.

In the middle of the large lawn occupying most of the garden's Upper Terrace, Lo points out a couple of lamp posts — the sole remnants of a large home built by German botanist and physician William Hillebrand in 1853. Lo explains how the large Queensland kauri, earpod and kapok trees on each side of the posts — among the oldest trees in the garden — were planted by Hillebrand himself. The doctor later sold the 5.5-acre property to Capt. Thomas Foster and his wife Mary, who continued to add to the garden until her death in 1930. Bequeathed to the city, the property opened to the public as Foster Botanical Garden in November 1931 under the direction of botanist Harold Lyon.

The annoying din of H-1 traffic slowly gives way to the sound of wind-rustled leaves from the Middle Terrace and Palm Garden trees as we move through a canopy of tall mineral-rich trees in the garden's Prehistoric Glen. As Lo explains how the property once had impeccable views of Honolulu Harbor, my eyes focus on a large sign beneath a sky-scraping cannonball tree that reads "Caution: Watch Out For Falling Cannonballs." No one in our group gazes skyward except me.

An hour into the tour, Lo quickly guides us through the Nu'uanu- and Vineyard-bordered Economic Garden and its collection of herb, spice, dye, beverage and poisonous plants. Passing a calabash nutmeg tree, Lo snips off a brightly colored blossom, aptly alerting us to the flower's uncanny — though somewhat smaller-scale — resemblance to the carnivorous Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors."

A lengthy pause at the garden's impressively maintained hybrid orchid hothouse — kept in bloom year-round with the garden's 10,000-strong hybrid collection — is followed by a stroll through the Daibutsu Terrace, a grassy lawn guarded by a bronze replica of the great Buddha of Kamakura and large baobab, rainbow shower and red saraca trees. Our 90-minute tour ends near the paths of Foster Garden's spacious entry area, home to this weekend's popular Friends of Honolulu Botanical Garden semi-annual plant sale.

Not surprisingly, there were far more sights and trivia gleaned from my Foster Garden excursion than I could possibly fit in this space. So a trip of your own through this metropolitan oasis comes highly recommended. Lo guides the tour each Thursday.

The garden entrance, by the way, is on the mauka side of Vineyard Boulevard.