Hawaii can be an awfully rough place for a native plant trying to survive in the wild. After all, they don’t call it the “endangered species capital of the world” for nothing and, indeed, more than 100 endemic plant species have gone extinct.

Thanks to the Plant Extinction Prevention Program of Hawai‘i and The Nature Conservancy, the Molokai Cyanea is not one of them.

Incredibly, miraculously, this lovely purple-fruited lobelia — documented in the earliest biological surveys of Molokai — was pulled back from the edge of extinction after the known population of Cyanea procera was down to only one individual.

And that one plant was doing quite poorly despite a plethora of attempts to try to make it reproduce.

“It was really, really bleak,” PEPP biologist Ane Bakutis said, recalling the plant’s prospects. “We tried everything.”

Decades ago the species was thought to be extinct, the likely victim of wild pigs, goats, deer, rats and slugs — until Ed Misaki, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Molokai program, in 1984 spotted a single plant he didn’t recognize while pig hunting in the island’s high valleys.

He was following his dogs, who were chasing a pig into a steep gulch.

“I turned the corner, and there was this amazing prehistoric-looking tree,” he said.

The plant, with an appearance similar to a palm tree, was about 30 feet tall and perhaps 6 inches or larger in diameter at the base of its trunk.

Misaki called his boss, biologist Alan Holt in Honolulu, and described the plant. Holt recognized it as the Cyanea procera.

Over the next decade or so, a few more individuals were discovered. But by 2005, only two had survived: a mature plant clinging to a vertical cliff in Kawela Gulch and a seedling 50 feet downstream.

Those two plants became one of the first projects of the state’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program, established by the Hawai‘i Rare Plant Restoration Group, a consortium of more than 60 public and private land management agencies and landowners with a common goal to protect Hawaii’s rarest and endangered plant species.

PEPP operates as a project of the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with an aim to protect and save species that have fewer than 50 plants remaining in the wild. Across the state, there are 238 “PEPP species,” with 32 on Molokai.

The Molokai Cyanea was perhaps the most endangered of them all.

Bakutis and her crew pulled out all the stops and tried all the tricks in the next few years in an effort to try to get those plants to seed.

They put a net underneath the mother plant to catch the ripe fruit as they fell from high above. But the fruits were so wormy they were essentially seedless.

With insects devouring the flowers of the young plant, they tried placing a mosquito net over the crown. But the bugs were still getting in.

They also collected tissue to try growing plants in the laboratory, where hormones were used to promote new growth. But that didn’t work, either.

The outlook wasn’t promising by 2012, Bakutis said, when the mama plant fell off the cliff wall, crashed to the ground and died.

“I cried,” she recalled. “We were down to one plant.”

It was about that time that a colleague on Kauai was having success against insect attack in lobelias using a particular systemic insecticide, she said, so they tried that — and it worked.

The flowers, violet with white stripes, grew really big, while the purple fruit swelled to be 2 inches to 3 inches long and eggplant-shaped. Inside was white flesh and black seeds, almost like a dragon fruit.

“We were so excited,” Bakutis said. “We threw a party — it was so amazing.”

The new fruit was shipped for processing to two separate laboratories: UH’s Lyon Arboretum and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Olinda Rare Plant Facility on Maui.

It turned out they had thousands of viable seeds.

“That was great news,” Bakutis said. “The angels came down from heaven and saved another species. We didn’t want another endangered species to disappear.”

More than 500 seedlings are now planted in the Conservancy’s Kamakou Preserve, which is fenced against pig predation.

Misaki, who recently joined Bakutis and staffers Kristin Coelho and Patty Pali in planting some of the new Cyanea within the preserve, said he feels a deep sense of satisfaction in having played a role in the survival.

“I’m elated,” he said. “It feels so good to see this plant surviving now.”

Some of the plants that were put into the ground in October are already 5 feet tall and could fruit this year.

The biologists said that since all of the offspring are from a single plant, inbreeding remains a concern.

But a recent discovery of a couple more Molokai Cyanea plants on a remote North Shore cliff could provide hope for expanded genetic diversity, Misaki said.