It's the kind of summer flowering trees love
By Heidi Bornhorst Advertiser library photo
We are sure having a gorgeous season of flowering trees.
All along our freeways, silver trumpet trees grace us with gold. Gold trees give a brilliant, full yet ephemeral show. The entire tree fills with golden trumpet blossoms.
Silver trumpet trees, their close relative, are less showy, but have a longer blooming cycle with the same fragile golden blossoms.
Some akamai landscape planners put them all along the freeway through town.
Rainbow shower trees in many shades line our streets and shade our parks. When the welcome trade winds blow, a rain of petals comes down.
These flowering trees are a made-in-Hawai'i hybrid that sets no seeds and blooms solidly for about eight months of the year.
Get up early in the morning for a walk in Kapi'olani Park, at UH-Manoa, at the Hale Koa Hotel and Fort DeRussy, or your favorite neighborhood park or school and sniff for the fragrance of rainbow shower blossoms. The Queen's White variety has a particularly lovely scent early in the morning. This is the really pale light yellow and white variety of our official Honolulu street tree.
Kapi'olani Park is full of awesome trees, from the towering ironwoods (those in the ironwood grove are all "exceptional trees" protected by law, so we really need to keep vehicles off of their roots), to the varied species of banyans, giant shady kiawe trees, and the many rainbow showers.
Kapi'olani Park is not like just any park. It has a mandate and is part of a historic trust, established in 1896. The basic mandate is that the park will always be free and open to all. Commercialization is kapu. The park was dedicated by King David Kalakaua in 1877 and named for his beloved Queen Kapi'olani.
If you want to know more, check out the book "Kapi'olani Park: A History" by Robert R. Weyeneth. Kapi'olani park is something like the Central Park of Honolulu, and we should all cherish and care for it a little bit more. The Kapi'olani Park Preservation Society works hard to keep the park free, open and available for all of us to visit and enjoy.
Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable-landscape consultant. Submit 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.
Rainbow shower trees are among the glories of Kapi'olani Park. They're a made-in-Hawai'i hybrid that blooms for much of the year.
