Come join us in cool, beautiful Wahiawa Botanical Garden for a special garden event and plant sale from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sept. 19.

This upland mauka garden is always free, and if you haven't been there recently you are in for a special treat. The upper garden has new paths that are easy to walk on, even with a keiki stroller or a wheelchair. There is also a new visitors center, as well as new educational spaces.

Wahiawa is a very special community with great civic pride and some fabulous dedicated gardeners, and this is the first time in 10 years we've held an event like this. Alvin Tsuruda of Waihale Products, a top specialty plant grower and kalo farmer, is chairman of the event.

Over time, the garden has evolved from a dry red-dirt gulch with rows of sugar planter test trees to a place of shady lawns with beautiful trees and gingers on the upper lawn and a great hikeable gulch with native Hawaiian plants, palms, tree ferns, gingers and Heliconias from the tropics. There is an Okinawan garden (the Kuraoka terrace), rare hibiscus and lovely flowering trees that like a cool mauka climate (like we all do in the hot, baking Hawaiian summertime).

The Friends of Honolulu Botanical Gardens is doing educational displays and inviting the top nurseries and growers to join us. The plant sale will feature a large selection of indoor and outdoor plants for your apartment lanai, or blooming edible yard. There will be more than 40 varieties of anthuriums to see or buy, from minis to giant obake. New Hawaiian hybrid anthuriums will be offered. The grower has desktop cutie plants in decorative pots for the perfect office or hostess gift. Bromeliads, cacti, succulents, bonsai water garden plants such as water lilies, lotus or hasu, and dwarf water lettuce will all be on display and on sale.

Kay Lynch is bringing her special tissue-cultured native Hawaiian ferns including palapalai and the rarely available young hapu'u tree ferns. Hapu'u are known as "the mother of the Hawaiian rainforest." You can see how they look when they grow up, all at Wahiawa Botanical Garden.

The garden is at 1396 California Ave. and you can call 537-1708 for more information.