Sweet-smelling ginger can be both pleasant and a pest

Late one pau hana evening, I was picking a sweet bouquet of fragrant ginger from my garden. Ah, I thought to myself, this is one of life’s simple, joyful pleasures. To pick ginger by the handful, stick it in a vase and enjoy it. To wear it in my hair the next day and share it with my co-workers, neighbors and friends. I even made a birthday lei for my sister Mimi by collecting buds in the morning and refrigerating them in water for several days until I had enough.

Fragrant white, yellow and salmon-colored gingers are one of the joys of Hawaii. They are a longtime kamaaina plant in our gardens.

In the lowlands where most of us live and grow gardens, it takes some good horticulture and prep to grow ginger.

The main thing is properly preparing the soil. Most home gardens have “junk” soil, and we need to work on this with compost, raked-up leaves and other organics. If you do worm composting, share some of that with your ginger patch. Gingers, like bananas, are what we gardeners call heavy feeders. They like rich red dirt or loamy brown soil, and they like water. They flower best if grown in full sun. One reason they are doing so well is the very wet summers we’ve had the past few years. Our water bill is down but gingers are up!

In our upland forests, gingers can be a pest, an invasive alien. They go wild up mauka and need to be kept in control. Cut every flower stalk if you have the salmon-colored (also known as Kalihi ginger), white or yellow gingers up at high elevations. Don’t let the seeds spread into pristine rainforests like up at Kokee on Kauai or Volcano on the Big Island. Be careful with the rhizomes or specialized ginger roots, too. They can spread and take over whole hillsides, crowding out native Hawaiian plants. This is partly due to where gingers originate: the foothills of the Himalayas and cooler areas of India. This is also why this type of ginger will grow on the mainland and in other more temperate climes.

So feel free to happily pick ginger if you are hiking or taking a drive up Tantalus, Kokee or Volcano. You are helping to control alien invasives and filling your life (and car) with their nice, fleeting fragrance.

Gingers are in the genus Hedychium, which means fragrant snow. Isn’t that a great name? It also shows that they don’t mind a bit of cold. White ginger is Hedychium coronarium. Yellow is H. Flavum and Kahili ginger is H. gardnerianum. They are in the Zingiberaceae plant family.

For those who worry about ginger spreading, there are some sterile hybrids. I have a favorite, given to me by Adrian Brash, who has an amazing garden up on Tantalus. It is a bright orange, hybrid kahili ginger that doesn’t set seed.

When I had the pleasure of visiting his garden, he was barefoot and mowing his 1-acre lawn. I asked him in amazement what kind of fertilizer he used, and he replied, “Opala.”

“Opala!” I said. “Like rubbish?”

“Organic opala, leaves and such from my garden — that’s all I use, no chemical or purchased fertilizer,” he sagely replied.

This was a big lesson for me. The University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I was formally educated, and the plant nurseries where I had worked all used commercial chemical fertilizer, imported here to Hawaii. His garden was amazing and fairly easy to maintain.

This is how I now care for the gingers in my own garden: Feed the soil with recycled organics and generous watering when the weather is dry.

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