HAWAI'I GARDENS
Lehua haole is a way to brighten winter gardens
By Heidi Bornhorst
Q. How do you grow lehua haole?
A. It is a bean, in the Fabaceae family, and can be grown from the bean-like seeds that follow the pollinated flower. You can also dig up a root sucker and grow it that way. This gives you a larger plant, and you can be surer of the flower color. You can also buy a plant at a landscape nursery or have your garden shop special-order one for your garden.
What's in bloom
At Christmas, we were treated to a lovely floral sight that will be with us for the next month or so, depending on how wet, windy and wild the weather continues to be. My parents' neighbors had a pretty "borrowed landscape" for all of us to enjoy: a large, bright-red flowered variety of the lehua haole (Calliandra ineqilatera) from Brazil complemented by a white poinsettia, which is a great blooming shrub for our gardens at this time of year. In the background was another haole lehua with a slightly different colored flower, highlighted by a hedge of snowbush. The colors were lights, whites, brights and red.
All this makes for simple, tough and easy-to-maintain landscaping. The planting gives the whole neighborhood joy and a festive, colorful view for next door and the neighbors up the hill, too.
Haole lehua flowers come in red, pink or white.
Growing up, we had a favorite neighbor who had a bright red haole lehua. She pruned it so it was shaped and rounded just like the pom-pom flowers.
One year, she let me make a lei for my best friend's birthday. It makes a classic soft feathery lei.
You can wear the blossoms in your hair or cut them for flower arrangements. Cut a stem, quickly immerse it in deep water and it will magically open in time for an evening's festive flower arrangement.
What a lovely sight for the New Year.
Time to plant
Lettuce and green onions are good crops to start now.
Chinese peas are also a good winter crop for us. Green onions are easy to start in a pot, with the leftover bottom part with roots you get at the grocery store. Use the green tops in your favorite recipes, then save the bases and plant them.
This is a pretty good way to have green onions handy. I am always happy to buy a bunch of them, too, and support our local farmers.
It's amazing how cheap this nursing bunch of versatile greens is, considering all the grower went through to produce it.
If you love fragrant flowers, it's also the season to plant narcissus.
You can take a special course on how to grow narcissus in an intricate bonsai fashion, or you can grow them in pebbles in water in a decorative container without holes.
Change the water daily. You want to replicate the growth conditions of a cool stream.
Send questions to islandlife@honoluluadvertiser.com or Island Life, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Letters may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms. Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable-landscape consultant.
