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Garden Club of America honors Leland Brian Miyano

It's hard to put just one papale, or hat, on Leland Brian Miyano. He aims an artistic eye and firm hand on the landscape, and a conservationist's heart on our fragile and precious environment, and inserts a sense of humor, fun and adventure into his life and our lives.

Landscape designer Leland Brian Miyano was recently awarded the Mrs. Oakleigh Thorne medal by the Garden Club of America. Here he is seen with the rare Encephalartos woodii, also known as the Nygoye Forest Cycad, which he helped restore at Foster Gardens. Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

Beyond Miyano's work as a landscape designer, he is a sustainable and experimental gardener, trained artist, noted writer, passionate speaker and much more. Among his trademarks: He loves rocks — big rocks! — and uses them as sculptural garden furniture, pointing out that gorgeous boulders like this get ground up for road gravel every day.

Miyano has deep concerns about the environment and takes steps to protect and perpetuate native Hawaiian forests and their creatures. He is passionate about the mysterious and rare ka huli, or pupu kani oe, and other Hawaiian land snails. Some of his fossil shell finds are in the Smithsonian. And slides of his notable gardens are in the Garden Club of America's national collection.

Miyano is a long time board member of the Friends of Honolulu Botanical Gardens. This is the nonprofit group that keeps the Honolulu Botanical Gardens. You can always tell when Miyano has his hand in one of our garden events, such as the Midsummer Night's Gleam, our plant sales and the recent Hawaiian plant and lei workshop at Ho'omaluhia. Some of you may remember the interactive, carvable ice sculptures at a Gleam event, or the Singin' in the Rainforest feature at Wahiawa botanical garden; those were special touches from Miyano and his gourmet wife, Karen. Miyano started helping the gardens back in 1979 when he volunteered to help weed at Koko Crater Botanical Garden.

Miyano has implemented his garden designs all around the islands in a sustainable and artistic fashion. The Contemporary Museum garden, Foster Garden and many private residences have been given some of the Miyano touch. He is happy to share his knowledge about sustainable landscaping in Hawai'i and his concerns about our future.

He says he has had some great mentors. He was a special favorite of the gardener extraordinaire May Moir. The late landscape architect David Woolsey inspired him early on. The noted, late Roberto Burle Marx, a Brazilian landscape architect and fellow renaissance man, took Miyano under his venerable wing. Seeing massive forest habitats rapidly destroyed, working to rescue rare and wonderful plants from beneath the tracks of the bulldozers and from the fires in Brazil, Miyano thought about the same sort of thing going on all the time in Hawai'i.ÊHe absorbed much about landscape architecture and use of plants, and developed some of his conservationist passions, under Burle Marx's tutelage.

Miyano expresses his artistic side and environmental passion by composing special exhibits such as the raved-about rainforest exhibit at the Art Academy during the Garden Club of Honolulu display in 1998. He also does displays of xeriphytic, or less thirsty, plants.

Miyano cherishes all kinds of vastly different plants. He loves prehistoric "dinosaur" plants such as cycads, encephalartos and zamias. He was instrumental in restoring and revitalizing the prehistoric glen at Foster Botanical Garden in 1993. This garden of "living fossils" won the Garden Club of America Founders Fund Award in 1968. He also developed a conceptual master plan for the National Tropical Botanical Garden Cycad collection.

Heidi Bornhorst is director of Honolulu's botanical gardens. Reach her by e-mail at islandlife@honoluluadvertiser.com.