2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Every month we will weave a lei for you, one that brings together plants and stories from our five botanic gardens. This lei celebrates breadfruit — a plant with deep roots in Oceania with immense potential for food security on a global scale. In 2003, NTBG established the Breadfruit Institute to promote the conservation, study, and use of breadfruit for food and reforestation. The Institute is a global leader in efforts to conserve and use breadfruit diversity to support regenerative agriculture, food security, and economic development in the tropics and serves as the international center for breadfruit research and information resources.
Left: November’s lei made to celebrate breadfruit. Right: The 2024 fall intern cohort and lei makers (from left to right): Julia Fandetti, Louis Flores-Lopez, Lenny Sciulli, and Brandon Green
This lei — made from the golden-brown leaf sheaths of breadfruit—was woven by our fall interns. For decades, our Fall Internship Program has offered students and emerging professionals the chance to dive into the world of public gardens. This year, our four fall interns conducted a project to assess the health of NTBG’s breadfruit trees across our Hawaiʻi gardens. Read on to learn more about them, their project, and the inspiration for this lei.
Help us weave together a flourishing future with a year-end gift to ensure tropical plants and the ecosystems they sustain will thrive for generations to come.
Donate nowLeft: The fall interns start braiding the breadfruit leaf sheaths together. Right: Lenny Sciulli gifts Julia Ávila the breadfruit lei
Every week, the fall interns assessed the health of breadfruit trees at our Hawaiʻi gardens, providing an important baseline of data and a comparative analysis of these trees across different growing locations. For this lei, they gathered leaf sheaths in our Regenerative Organic Breadfruit Agroforest in McBryde Garden representing different breadfruit varieties. As our interns come from different backgrounds and lived experiences, the breadfruit varieties speak to a diversity of heritage, stories, and potentials. Each intern wove a strand that was then wiliwili, or twisted, to form one unified lei. Below, each intern reflects on the fall internship program and their work with breadfruit tree asssesments:
From Lenny Sciulli:
I think I will look back on the Fall Intern Program as one of the most incredible things that I’ve done in my life. I’ve truly enjoyed every moment. My favorite part of the breadfruit tree assessments was that I got to put into practice skills that I had actually learned in my college degree program. Doing modified tree assessments was what I did with my arboriculture professor and my arboretum supervisor. It was fun feeling like the little bird, you know, fledging the nest and actually using these skills in real life for meaningful work.
From Julia Fandetti:
I didn’t really expect it, but the breadfruit tree assessment project was one of my favorite things that I did during the Fall Internship Program. Before I came here, I didn’t know what breadfruit was. I didn’t know anything about it. And then the further I got into it, I really loved to see how versatile breadfruit was in different recipes and all of the different varieties out there. I really learned to love it too. At the Kahanu Garden & Preserve’s ʻUlu Cook-off, I came full circle. I couldn’t get enough breadfruit with all the amazing dishes that they made. This work really changed my perspective on breadfruit. It was nice to go so deep into the world of this plant and see how integrated it is within the community in Hawaiʻi.
From Brandon Green:
I learned a lot on this trip. I think I’ve never learned more in a three month period ever in my life, except for maybe learning to read! I will say this transition was an enormous challenge for me. There was so much change, and you can anticipate it all you want, and you can prepare for something as much as you can, but that will never prepare you for actually being somewhere and doing something and taking a risk like this. The feeling of community at NTBG was so palpable. I’ve never felt more invited into a space and more supported by such a large group of people. And I couldn’t have gotten here without the support of everyone. Everybody has had so much to teach me.
From Louis Flores-Lopez:
I have a lot of highlights from this internship, and a lot of things I would like to show and share. Working with the breadfruit tree assessment, I had the chance to see many varieties and compare the fruits. Now, my perception of the breadfruit has changed. I have to say that before coming here, I thought breadfruit was just a boring, starchy fruit that I only enjoy in tostones (I do really love tostones). But now I know how versatile it is, how important the tree is in this culture, and how important it can be in the future around the world.
Discover all of our lei legacy stories and check out upcoming events in celebration of NTBG’s 60th anniversary.
