Nature nurtured

"Wait a minute, that’s not even the real garden," said Duck Gambill, as a visitor admires the lush vegetation, thick with palm trees, cactuses and other plants that grow along the driveway to his Kaneohe home.

True enough, once in the backyard, the garden, carefully and naturally nurtured by Gambill and his wife, Ulu, for more than 40 years, literally springs to life — and that’s not even taking into account the sculptures of fish, birds and other critters that decorate the place. Flowering plants, fruit trees, ferns and spices all have found a home in the garden. Even the air, already heavy with the moisture of Windward Oahu, is thick with the humidity and fragrance of growing plants.

The Gambills’ garden is merely an extension of the modest home they bought in 1969. Indeed, their first major design decision was to have a huge stone fireplace built outside, which then became the main support for the lanai.

"This thing burned for two years straight," Gambill said. "We put a bed out here and lived outside."

The lanai has since become a popular gathering spot for the couple’s friends and family, who gather to kani­ka­pila on weekends. Ulu Gambill also practices hula on the lanai, which is equipped with a television monitor so that she can watch her favorite instructional videos.

The Gambills say the garden is not difficult to maintain, the result of a fortuitous decision made years ago when they first started to develop the space. The yard originally was just grass, but "we did not want to mow the lawn every two weeks," Ulu Gambill said, so they used red cinders to cover a small corner of the garden.

"We decided, ‘Wow, this is what we should do, because there’s no maintenance,’" her husband said. "So I got a friend of mine, a cowboy from Wyoming, and he helped me every weekend and we took a shovel and scooped all the soil off to get rid of the grass."

Duck Gambill then laid down roofing paper to keep weeds from sprouting — it’s been effective for more than 30 years — and covered it with more of the red cinder, creating pathways and planters throughout the garden.

"We wanted a walk-through garden," Ulu Gambill said.

With the thick vegetation blocking wide viewing planes but not too much light, the pathways bring visitors to hidden corners and delightful surprises at nearly every step of the 8,376-square-foot lot, such as the stone Chinese lantern or the sunny pedestal where the cat likes to play.

Over the years, they’ve brought in rocks from all over the island to decorate the garden, often with the help of bodybuilding friends who wanted a workout. Many of those rocks went into a multilevel wall in the back of the property, built as tall as the home, with a winding pathway laid into it. The pathway enables one to pick the papayas and avocadoes without a ladder. Not a bit of concrete or mortar is keeping it all in place, just gravity and the wall-building expertise of Duck Gambill’s cowboy friend. "Every weekend we’d be there drinking beer and laying them in," he said.

So much has accumulated over 40 years that it seems like a list of what is growing in the garden could be as long as a list of what isn’t. Ulu Gambill likes the way bromeliads look among rocks, and with so many rocks in the garden, they have many varieties.

Some plant choices are practical, such as dusty millers, a low foliage that gives off a silvery glow, near dark walkways. "At night it’s like light bulbs so it lights the way," she said.

Ulu Gambill grew up near Hilo in an orchid-producing family and in years past brought many Hawaii island plants to her Kaneohe garden. "You go to Hilo, everything’s much cheaper to ship here," she said. "But now I’m afraid to bring any plants here because of the coqui frog."

The Gambills used to have kalo that her mother planted and which produced the poi they ate every day. They’ve landscaped over that plot with plants given to them by friends or found at various places around the state. Their best avocado tree was grown from a seed that one of Duck Gambill’s friends sprouted in his kitchen.

There’s just about everything one could want in a garden: a "kitchen garden" devoted to things like chives, parsley and cilantro; a koi pond; and shady and sunny spots. Yet there’s enough space to display Duck Gambill’s collection of license plates, old bottles, cast-iron cookware and Western art. Overall, the place feels comfortably cluttered, in a fun sort of way.

A native of Tennessee, Duck Gambill, now 73, first came to Hawaii in 1963 while in the military. After his two-year stint, he went home, cashed in his savings bonds "and came right back over here." He worked in the motorcycle and car business until his recent retirement. He and Ulu Gambill, a 66-year-old retired telecommunications technician, have been married 46 years.

"We like to be outside all the time," Ulu Gambill said. "There was a lot of pressure at my job, and being here is so relaxing."

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