Returning to Wahiawa for a botanical adventure

When my friend Rachel Morton, who lives in Keeau on the Big Island, comes home to visit her mom and care for her garden, we always like to have a garden adventure.

We both started as part-time botany clerks at Foster Botanical Garden, and on her most recent visit, we took a drive up to Wahiawa Botanical Garden. There we were warmly welcomed by Cisco Martin Del Campo Jr., programs/volunteer coordinator for Honolulu Botanical Gardens, and volunteer John Sharp at the entry desk.

John was busy making green ki (ti leaf) lei as they chatted with us. He had an ingenious lei-making tool made from an old clothes hanger hooked onto the desk. When I make lei ki, I knot the end and hold it between my big and second toes, but you get a foot cramp after doing this for a while. The tool let him clip into the desk, secure the ti and make a nice, tight, well-woven lei while still greeting and informing visitors to the garden.

Cisco said volunteers at all the city’s botanical gardens gather flowers and make lei to put on veterans’ graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl for Memorial Day. The lei are kept in the freezer until needed.

Wow! Such a creative and fun use of volunteer time, and lei making is a great shared garden activity.

The lei making takes place through May. To volunteer, call Cisco at 628-1190 or visit honolulu.gov/parks/hbg.html.

INSIDE THE Wahiawa garden we saw some old friends, longtime volunteers Sylvia Matsui, Florida Lee, Edith Cambra and Doris Lee. They were dressed in blue garden-volunteer shirts, jeans and boots, and they had buckets to contain the weeds they were carefully plucking from garden beds. (Akamai tip: Pull weeds and contain them in a bucket or bag so their seeds won’t spread.)

Also hard at work maintaining the garden were staffers Edison Yoro and Bill Pierce.

Do you know about this 27-acre upland garden gem? It’s free to enter and it’s amazing!

Back in the 1930s the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association used the land as an experimental arboretum to grow trees for watershed enhancement. The land was up for grabs in the late 1950s when it was run down, with rows of trees and tall, overgrown Guinea grass.

Honolulu Botanical Gardens Director Paul Weissich wanted the property and its upland rainforest climate for growing rare and Hawaiian plants. Weissich and crew cleared out the grass, edited the trees and saved the best and most interesting, rare or well-grown specimens. One design theme of the garden is epiphytes, or plants that grow on trees. These include orchids, aroids, ferns and aerial-growing cactuses.

The volunteer docent program started when we got a call from Grace Dixon, who had returned to Hawaii with her husband, Frank, to make Wahiawa her home. Grace had volunteered at Filoli Historic House & Garden in Woodside, Calif., and wanted to share some of her energy with our garden and community.

She called the Friends of Honolulu Botanical Gardens and spoke with Caroline Bond Davis, who then called me all excited and said, “Heidi, this woman may be the answer to growing Wahiawa volunteers and getting you some more help up there!” (I was horticultural supervisor there at the time.)

Paul walked around the garden and talked story with Grace, and soon we were having all kinds of fun and creative programs at Wahiawa. Lots of volunteers were recruited, trained and nurtured. (“Always feed your volunteers, make it fun and never waste their time!” is something my mother, Marilyn Bornhorst, always taught us.)

Some of our first volunteers were the wives of retired garden workers. They came, liked it and spread the word to their friends and neighbors.

After my visit to the Wahiawa garden with Rachel, we found out that our dear Paul had died the night before. I think his happy spirit was with us in the garden that day, enjoying all the plants, trees, palms, ferns, cactuses and rare plants from other mauka tropical areas.

Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable landscape consultant specializing in native, xeric and edible gardens. Reach her at heidibornhorst@gmail.com.