NTBG Director of Science and Conservation, Dr. David Lorence and Research Biologist, Ken Wood are co-authors of the recently published study, “A global plastid phylogeny of the fern genus Asplenium (Aspleniaceae).”

Abstract

The infrageneric relationships and taxonomy of the largest fern genus, Asplenium(Aspleniaceae), have remained poorly understood. Previous studies have focused mainly on specific species complexes involving a few or dozens of species only, or have achieved a large taxon sampling but only one plastid marker was used. In the present study, DNA sequences from six plastid markers (atpB, rbcL, rps4, rps4‐trnS, trnL and trnL‐F) of 1030 accessions (616 of them newly sequenced here) representing c. 420 species of Asplenium(60% of estimated species diversity), 16 species of Hymenasplenium, three Diplaziopsidaceae, and four Rhachidosoraceae were used to produce the largest genus‐level phylogeny yet for ferns.

Our major results include: (i) Asplenium as broadly circumscribed is monophyletic based on our inclusion of representatives of 32 of 38 named segregate genera; (ii) 11 major clades in Asplenium are identified, and their relationships are mostly well‐resolved and strongly supported; (iii) numerous species, unsampled in previous studies, suggest new relationships and numerous cryptic species and species complexes in Asplenium; and (iv) the accrued molecular evidence provides an essential foundation for further investigations of complex patterns of geographical diversification, speciation and reticulate evolution in this family.

Read the full text on Cladistics

By Jon Letman  

Leaving his sunny California roots behind, budding journalist Daniel Stone — then 22 years old — set off to Washington, D.C., to cover politics. The young reporter had a core interest in environmental issues and saw his position at Newsweek magazine as an opportunity to cover the intersection of public policy and science. In 2009, still less than three years in Washington, Daniel learned of NTBG’s Environmental Journalism Program offered on Kauai; he applied and was accepted.

In hindsight, the program was a turning point in his career. “Not only did I have immediate access to extremely smart and advanced scientific minds, but I also understood the urgency behind things I’d always been interested in.”

As part of the five-day Environmental Journalism Program, Daniel joined six other journalists for a week of immersive instruction focused on plant conservation, ecology, and environmental issues specific to tropical islands.

Impressed by efforts to save the rare plants that he encountered on Kauai, Daniel thought, “These issues are so important and so timely, I can be in a position to write about, explain, and introduce them to a much wider audience.”

Daniel had covered general botany before but says NTBG’s program afforded him the chance to interact directly with people and plants in a setting where the issues were “razor sharp in their relevance and timeliness.” He called the program a novel and eye-opening experience.

Energized and enthused, Daniel returned to Washington eager to expand his environmental reporting. Throughout the coming months, he made a “very deliberate” professional shift toward covering plants, science, and nature.

Months later, Daniel enrolled in a two-year graduate program on environmental science and policy, after which he decided it was time to make his move.

From the White House to the Greenhouse

It was 2012 and Daniel was covering the White House by then. It was a plum beat — every political reporter’s dream job — but Daniel couldn’t betray his passion for science. When the opportunity arose, he accepted a job as an articles editor for National Geographic.

At the time, Daniel was unfamiliar with the early 20th century National Geographic board member and contributing editor David Fairchild. But when a colleague described the historic figure as an “adventurer botanist,” Daniel’s curiosity was piqued and he embarked on what would grow into a three-year project researching the legendary plant explorer’s diaries, journals, and photographs as well as thousands of archival documents.

Seeing the potential for a fresh examination of the legendary plant collector, Daniel contacted Fairchild’s surviving grandchildren and planned a trip to Fairchild’s historic residence, The Kampong, in Coconut Grove, Florida.

By his own admission, Daniel became “obsessed” with Fairchild’s story. It was during his 2014 visit to The Kampong, and to the actual study where Fairchild had written his most influential books, that Daniel realized he had unwittingly returned to NTBG.

Daniel described the rush of inspiration he felt as he sat on a bench on The Kampong lawn gazing out at the placid waters of Biscayne Bay. “It really clicked at that moment,” Daniel recalled. A one-time NTBG student and writer for National Geographic, Daniel was pursuing — and felt pursued by — the story of a man who had his own deep ties to both organizations.

Over the next three years, Daniel’s research led him on a journey from The Kampong to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland, north to the Nova Scotia seaside estate of Fairchild’s father-in-law inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and east to the Yokohama nursery from where Fairchild introduced the sakura (cherry blossom trees) that have become synonymous with the U.S. capital.

Daniel’s own transformation — from political reporter to authoring a book about the plant explorer — stems, in no small part, to his participation in NTBG’s Environmental Journalism Program.

He says it’s difficult for him to imagine himself writing this book without having had a relationship with NTBG and the people he met. “I wouldn’t have realized how interesting plants could be if I hadn’t met people who showed me.”

The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

David Fairchild — plant explorer, innovator, diplomat, and yes, sometimes spy and thief — revolutionized what Americans eat. The remarkable story of this icon of agriculture, and his countless successes (and failures) are documented in author Daniel Stone’s recently published book The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats.

This new history recounts the early decades of Fairchild’s life (1869-1954), focusing on his career after moving from the plains of Kansas to his humble beginnings in the 1890s as a junior scientist studying plant pathology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Daniel reveals how Fairchild went on to explore and collect thousands of plants around the world alongside his wealthy and colorful patron, Barbour Lathrop.

The Food Explorer is the story of a man dedicated to enriching the American agricultural palette, helping farmers adopt new crops, and encouraging a sometimes reluctant public to accept new foods and plants.

Daniel paints a vivid portrait of Fairchild circling the globe with growing enthusiasm and confidence, searching for plants of economic and nutritional value. Returning with his bounty of seeds, cuttings, and fruits, Fairchild struggled to distribute and establish a market for culinary and agricultural curiosities, such as a leafy European peasant food called kale, an Andean grain named quinoa, and new varieties of okra, beans, melons, peppers, flax, and thousands of other plants.

Transforming the American Food Landscape

Fairchild’s best-known introductions include 38 varieties of mangos, Chilean avocados, Iraqi dates, Egyptian cotton, Bavarian hops, Italian seedless grapes, olives, cashews, peaches, pomegranates, and citrus of all stripes.

And while Fairchild’s government collections are well documented, Daniel notes the widely varying estimates of how many plants he actually introduced. USDA records confirm he was responsible for more than 5,000 plant introductions but other estimates range from “many thousands” to as high as 150,000.

In addition to the formidable roster of thousands of food crops, Fairchild was also responsible for introducing more than 3,000 sakura (cherry blossom trees) to Washington, D.C.. The story of the horticultural challenges and the diplomatic tightrope Fairchild walked to get the beloved Japanese trees from a nursery in Yokohama to the banks of the Potomac River described one of the most difficult and risky endeavors of his career.

As Daniel points out, “Fairchild is celebrated for his success… but he had a lot of failure too.” He cites the mangosteen as an example of a fruit Fairchild adored but was unsuccessful in establishing as a widely grown food in the United States. Fairchild called it “queen of tropical fruits,” but the mangosteen was also bulky, difficult to ship, easy to damage, and required a lot of effort to extract the small but delicate sweet flesh from the leathery rind. Alas, Fairchild’s favorite fruit never caught on.

Much of Fairchild’s USDA plant-collecting ended at the beginning of World War I as Americans grew more insular and cautious of all things foreign. The book’s final chapter recounts Fairchild’s later years, collecting on behalf of private plant enthusiasts in the 1920s and ’30s, concluding with Fairchild’s famed Chêng Ho expedition of 1939.

To read Daniel Stone’s exhaustively researched account of one of America’s premier plant explorers is to come away better informed about the history, science, politics, and plants of the world in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Food Explorer, both timely and timeless, is a delight whether you’re a botanist, a gardener, a farmer, or just someone who loves to eat and read.

Daniel Stone’s The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats, 416 pages (Dutton) is available in hardcover, eBook and, audio.

By Seana Walsh, Conservation Biologist and Dustin Wolkis, Seed Bank and Laboratory Manager

Ohia is the Hawaiian name for species in the genus Metrosideros. Ohia are the most abundant, ecologically important, and culturally significant plants in Hawaii. As a foundation species[1], forming the largest portion of the canopy in native wet and mesic forests, they provide food and shelter for many native animals, including our native forest birds and insects. Further, Ohia facilitate soil development, provide habitat for seedling establishment, and aid in replenishing our aquifers. Ohia are also culturally significant and prominent in many moolelo (stories), mele (songs), oli (chants), and are one of the kino lau (physical manifestations) for several Hawaiian deities.

Rapid Ohia Death

In 2013, Hawaii Island residents became concerned when they began observing seemingly healthy ohia trees dying within a matter of weeks. This phenomenon was termed Rapid Ohia Death (ROD). Researchers have now identified that ROD is caused by two recently described species of Ceratocystis fungi previously unknown to science, C. lukuohia (“destroyer of ohia”) and C. huliohia (“changes the natural state of ohia”). Although trees can be infected with either fungal species for long periods of time, nutrient and water transport is eventually blocked. Once a tree shows symptoms of infection by C. lukuohia, all leaves turn brown and the tree is dead within weeks. Infection by C. huliohia is more localized, potentially affecting only parts of the tree.

ROD has affected over 75,000 acres of native ohia forest on Hawaii Island. In May of 2018, C. huliohia, the less aggressive of the two fungal pathogens, was confirmed on Kauai. When Ohia disappears from the landscape, habitat for other native plants and animals vanishes; non-native, invasive plant species, such as strawberry guava (Psidium cattleyanum), replace native forests.

Mitigating the Spread of ROD

To mitigate the spread of ROD throughout the archipelago, the State of Hawaii has implemented a quarantine that prohibits the transport of untreated Ohia wood from Hawaii Island. A committee of experts have formulated a ROD Strategic Response Plan which includes a statewide effort to collect and bank Ohia seeds from seed zones throughout Hawaii.

Seed zones are areas within which plant materials can be transferred with higher likelihood of survival in their new location. These zones are a crucial tool used to guide plant collections and reintroductions.

NTBG staff and the Kauai Island Botanist of the Hawaii State Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DLNR, DOFAW) worked together to create seed zones for Kauai.

Based on climate and vegetation data, along with local knowledge of the environment, 10 unique zones were identified. Seed zones have helped guide landscape restoration projects across the continental United States. However, this approach to guide transfer of seeds has not been applied on Kauai, where the highly eroded island contains many different microclimates across relatively short distances. Although the impetus for creating seed zones was to guide current seed collections, banking, and future reintroductions with the potential for ROD to spread to Kauai, they have relevance for all native plant species occurring across the island.

In the winter of 2017, NTBG was awarded a grant from the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority to help mitigate the potential for ROD to impact Kauai. Components of the grant-funded project, in which many NTBG staff are involved, include outreach and education through workshops, our visitor program, and social media and marketing.

Seed Bank Partnership

This grant has supported coordinated efforts to collect, bank, and reciprocate seeds with Hawaii Seed Bank Partnership organizations of all four Metrosideros taxa from each of the 10 seed zones on Kauai. Throughout 2018, NTBG staff, interns, and volunteers embarked on approximately 30 collecting trips, half of which require helicopter flights to otherwise inaccessible locations. Collections were made from single individuals as well as from several individuals within a single population.

Individual plants were tagged using a “Population Reference Code” system standardized in the State of Hawaii. This unique plant ID system will ensure consistency and streamline future monitoring. Specifically, it will allow researchers, conservation biologists, and land managers to link individuals found to have ROD resistance or other measures of high fitness, back to the mother tree from which the seeds came.

The collecting goal for 2018 was from approximately 1,300 individual trees encompassing all four taxa spanning each seed zone in which they occur, totaling over six million seeds. A small portion of these seeds was sent to NTBG’s Conservation and Horticulture Center Nursery for immediate propagation for outreach, ex situ (“off-site”; outside their natural habitat) collections in our gardens, and in situ (“on-site”; in their natural habitat) restoration.

Most seeds were banked, as they are desiccation and freeze-tolerant and can, therefore, be stored using conventional methods (as opposed to seeds of species which are sensitive to desiccation and/or subfreezing temperatures, which require special storage conditions). After desiccation seeds are hermetically sealed and stored at -80°C.

Initial viability was determined for collections entering the NTBG Seed Bank and Laboratory, and viability of stored seeds will continue to be assessed at designated intervals throughout the lifetime of the collection. These data contribute to our understanding of seed longevity for each collection, and when taken as a whole, increases our knowledge at the species level. To mitigate against disaster striking any one storage facility, one-third of banked seeds are stored in the NTBG Seed Bank and Laboratory; one-third are stored on island at the Kauai DLNR, DOFAW Seed Bank; and one-third are stored off island on O‘ahu at the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum, Seed Conservation Laboratory.

How You Can Help

These seeds will provide geographically and genetically appropriate plant material for restoration, testing for resistance to the disease, and other current and future research. This work is only possible by a coordinated effort between many NTBG staff, interns, and volunteers, as well as partner organizations working on all aspects of the project. By undertaking this project we are doing our part to perpetuate Ohia on Kauai.

You can help prevent the spread of Rapid Ohia Death by not moving Ohia wood; not transporting Ohia inter-island; sanitizing tools, gear, apparel and other equipment, and pressure washing vehicles before and after working in Ohia forests. For more information on ROD, visit rapidohiadeath.org.

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[1] Foundation species are locally abundant, regionally common, and create conditions required by many other species. 

On the hottest summer nights when stillness in the garden signals the season’s climax, one plant offers relief. Rising from the murky depths of mud-bottomed ponds and steely surfaces choked with duckweed, slender green stems climb skyward, swaying just slightly, crowned with floral perfection — the sacred lotus.

Beauty, Elegance, and Dirt Repellant

Universally recognized for its beauty and elegance, the lotus blooms flawlessly in ponds, marshes, gardens pools, and in earthenware pots on temple grounds. Its superhydrophobic leaves, unrivaled in the botanical world, repel even the stickiest mud and are known as the “lotus effect.” Scientists and engineers study the plant’s water and dirt repellent quality, attempting to mimic it in clothing, paint, and other man-made surfaces.

This resistance to stain makes the lotus a symbol of purity in an otherwise polluted world. Buddha statues sit and recline on golden lotus in airy Thai wats and in the alcoves of candle-lit Tibetan monasteries. Synonymous with the auspicious and divine, the sacred lotus is India’s national flower and frequently used icon.

According to legend, India’s most revered river, the Ganges, first flowed across the earth after Lord Vishnu’s lotus feet were washed, giving the holy river the name Vishnupadi. Another one of the river’s 108 names is Vishnu Padabja Sambhuta which translates as “born from the lotus-like foot of Vishnu.” Indeed, the Hindu deity is frequently depicted standing or seated on a giant lotus blossom, holding a smaller lotus in hand.

Botanical Name and Uses

The botanical name Nelumbo nucifera is rooted in the Tamil nelum (blue) and Latin nux (nut) and fera (bearing), referring to lotus seeds which are called makhana or fox nut in India where they are eaten as a snack. Other parts of the plant are also valued as medicine and food. Lotus tubers or roots are eaten steamed, fried, pickled, and braised, and especially popular in East Asian dishes.

Famed botanist, explorer, and founder of The Kampong, Dr. David Fairchild collected sacred lotus while visiting Japan in 1902. In his notebook he wrote: “These plants are from a noted lotus grower in Tokyo, who claims to have hundreds of varieties and whose lotus show in late August is said to be unusually fine… All shades of pink, yellow, and green, and many variegated forms were represented.” Fairchild collected twenty varieties, including beni botan, ashimaru, tamausagi, and sakuraten.

Lotus at National Tropical Botanical Garden

Today at The Kampong, west of the Fairchild-Sweeney house, a pond is planted with two species of lotus — the ivory-white Nelumbo lutea, native to North America, and a stunning variety of N. nucifera called Bali Red, introduced by Kampong Director Emeritus Larry Schokman.

Look for lotus ponds at the Garden’s South Shore Visitor Center on Kauai as well as in the Allerton Garden across the Lawai Stream from the Allerton residence. That lotus pond evolved from what was once a Hawaiian fishpond. After being damaged by a tsunami in 1833, the area was used for growing watercress, taro, rice and then in the 1930s and 40s, commercial lotus production.

John Gregg Allerton is credited with restoring the pond in the 1970s after it had become abandoned and overgrown with bulrush, replanting lotus seeds from Japan. Repeatedly destroyed by tsunami and hurricanes, the pond has always been rebuilt by Garden staff and volunteers, cleared by hand and replanted so that the pond would again give rise to the swell of hundreds of pink lotus blossoms.

By Jon Letman, Editor              

Writing in A Monographic Study of the Hawaiian Species of the Tribe Lobelioideae Family Campanulaceae in 1919, botanist Joseph Rock described the genus Brighamia as “one of the most curious Hawaiian Lobelioideae, though not one of the handsome ones.” Rock noted that renowned American botanist Asa Gray named the succulent genus for Dr. William T. Brigham, the first director of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum.

Cabbage on a Fence Post

Describing the species that would later bear his name — Brighamia rockii — the Vienna-born botanist wrote unflatteringly: “It certainly is a most grotesque plant.” German botanist William Hillebrand, who preceded Rock in Hawaii by half a century, compared Brighamia to a “cabbage put on a fence post.”

Lobeliads, to which Brighamia belongs, found their way to the Hawaiian Islands some 13 million years ago in a single migration, evolving into 159 endemic taxa of Campanulaceae (bellflower family).

Rock was certain that Brighamia migrated from Australia, perhaps as one of the last of the Lobeliads to arrive in Hawaii and, as a result, lacked sufficient time to speciate before animals and humans began to present a threat.

Brighamia insignis and Brighamia rockii

In the early 1900s Brighamia was classified as a monotypic[1] genus although botanist Charles Forbes differentiated between the Brighamia on the cliffs of Kauai with their yellow flowers which inspired the species name citrina, and the Molokai form which bears white flowers. Today they are recognized as two species, B. insignis and B. rockii respectively. In Hawaiian they’re best known as alula or puaala.

Viewed side by side, they differ only slightly in appearance except for the color of the flowers. Other differences — calyx lobe size, leaf shape, seed surface — are very subtle.

Rock documented Brighamia’s habitat in the early 20^th century — the steep, windward cliffs of Niihau, Kauai, Molokai, and Lanai. He reported seeing Brighamia on the cliffs of the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai and “on almost bare rockwalls between Kalawao and Waikolu, within the spray of the sea, only a few feet above the mighty breakers of the Pacific.”

He also reported Brighamia growing in the dry, rocky gorges at the entrance to Molokai’s Halawa Valley. French botanist Jules Remy collected a single specimen in the early 1850s and the last Brighamia seen on Niihau was in 1947.

Searching the Known Habitat

It was another botanist, Harold St. John, serving as a scientific advisor for NTBG in the mid-1970s, that first suggested to a young nurseryman and field botanist named Steve Perlman to search for, collect, and grow Brighamia. Perlman was unfamiliar with the genus but began searching the known habitat.

Over the next three decades, Perlman, along with fellow NTBG botanist Ken Wood, climbed, rappelled, hand pollinated flowers, and later collected the tiny seeds as they defied gravity, roping along the vertigo-inducing cliffs of Kauai and Molokai.

Among their findings, they located several plants along the upper cliffs of Molokai’s Wailau Valley, but those plants are now gone. They spent years searching for B. rockii in the Halawa Valley, but found none. Perlman and Wood also collected seeds on Huelo Rock off Molokai but those plants are now gone. Perlman spotted B. rockii on Molokai’s Kaaloa cliffs and a few plants may remain.

Wild Brighamia Populations

The largest remaining wild population of B. rockii is on the cliffs of Waiehu, east of Wailele falls, but a series of landslides has rendered the area too hazardous to work and NTBG botanists haven’t been back since they last roped down to the site in 2011. The last known seed collection of B. rockii was by staff of the Plant Extinction Prevention program in December 2014. Today there are an estimated 30 plants remaining on Molokaii’s seacliffs.

On Kauai, B. insignis populations crashed after Hurricane Iniki devastated the island in 1992, with the last plant dying on Mt. Haupu in 2002 and the last one seen on the Na Pali Coast around 2015.

With the threat of landslides, hurricanes, feral goats, rats, and the loss of the suspected pollinator, a giant sphinx moth, wild Brighamia spp. hover just above extinction.

Between Kauai and Molokai, on the island of O‘ahu, there have never been credible claims documenting Brighamia. If it ever did exist there (nothing suggests that is so), one could posit that with limited field collectors and the difficulty of accessing steep cliff terrain, any plants might have vanished before they were discovered.

Working to Save Species

Spanning more than 30 years, NTBG botanists have collected seed from all Brighamia spp. colonies, making repeat visits to conduct pollen exchanges by hand, and returning to collect seed for deposit at NTBG’s Conservation and Horticulture Center. Garden staff determine if seeds are put into storage or propagated for outplanting. NTBG usually has anywhere from 50 – 250 B. insignis and less than a dozen B. rockii in the greenhouse for planting in the gardens.

Multiple attempts at outplanting B. insignis have been made with some of the most successful results in the relatively protected Limahuli Valley which is near their native habitat.

Perlman says, “We would like to have some protected areas to do outplanting of species…the best way to keep that species the same and alive is to put it back where it evolved, where you have the same rainfall and same kind of soil.”

Pollination and Seed Banking

Having hand-pollinated and collected tens of thousands of seeds, NTBG staff have partnered with Kalaupapa National Historic Park on Molokai whose natural resource managers have planted B. rockii on the cliffs as part of restoration efforts.

On Kauai, NTBG’s Seed Bank and Laboratory currently houses over 15,000 seeds from 52 accessions representing B. insignis and more than 11,000 B. rockii seeds from 23 accessions.

Seed Bank and Laboratory Manager Dustin Wolkis notes that Brighamia spp. represent some of the NTBG’s earliest seed collections, going back 24 years. Part of storing seeds at NTBG is conducting germination trials to better understand how long seeds can be stored and how to increase longevity. The seeds are desiccation tolerant but decline more rapidly at -18°C (conventional storage temperature) compared with cool +5°C.

Genetic material is also stored by the University of Hawaii’s Lyon Arboretum Hawaiian Rare Plant Program which has over 100 in vitro Brighamia spp. seedlings, as well as some 20,000 seeds (6,000 B. insignis and 14,000 B. rockii) banked. Additional seed collections are held by the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation in Colorado, and elsewhere.

For over a century, Brighamia has captured the imagination of botanists and fueled their passion for rare plant conservation. This includes Seana Walsh who, prior to accepting a position as a conservation biologist at NTBG, completed her Master’s thesis on the floral biology, pollination ecology, and ex situ genetic diversity of B. insignis.

Walsh has gone on to help establish collaborations between NTBG, Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG), and others who are conducting ongoing studies of genetic diversity of Brighamia. Based on these results, researchers at CBG are developing and implementing an ex situ conservation management plan for the species that considers lessons learned by zoologists with similar genetic management goals.

Cultivation

Besides outplanting live plants and storing living genetic material, growing B. insignis in cultivation and sharing widely among botanic gardens and the horticulture industry has increased plant numbers to the tens of thousands. These efforts stem from Perlman, who began sending Brighamia seeds to other botanical gardens, first across the U.S. and then in Europe where they caught the attention of commercial nurseries in the Netherlands and elsewhere. According to the sourcing guide PlantSearch, B. insignis is cultivated ex situ in at least 55 botanical collections.

In recent years, B. insignis has taken off as a wildly popular house plant sold in Europe as the “Vulcan palm” or “Hawaii palm.” And while there may be only one B. insignis and just a few dozen B. rockii left in the wild, today there are thousands of B. insignis growing in cultivation, all but ensuring they won’t fade away any time soon.

From a conservation standpoint, commercially grown cultivated plants may not be the ideal end goal, and yet the botanists who have spent decades literally risking their own lives to find, collect, and save these gems of plant evolution say it’s better than the alternative: an endemic plant genus abandoned on remote cliffs, left on its own to slip quietly and unnoticed into the permanence of extinction.

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[1] A genus with only one species

In 1955, a 37 family-strong community alliance called Hui Kuai Aina o Haena that had owned the ahupuaa (watershed and coastal lands) of Haena on Kauai’s north shore for nearly 100 years, began partitioning the region. By 1967, a third-generation member of the group, Juliet Rice Wichman, had negotiated ownership Haena’s Limahuli Valley.

A Love of Hibiscus and Hawaiian Plants

Juliet, a lover of Hawaiian plants, with a passion for collecting and growing hibiscus, had a vision to protect Limahuli which she recognized as culturally important and ecologically fragile. In 1967, she began removing cattle from the valley so the plants could start to recover. She also launched the restoration of centuries-old dry-wall style kalo loi (taro terraces).

By 1976 Limahuli was home to a small but growing botanical garden where 3,300-feet high valley walls had sheltered undiscovered rare plants for centuries.

Seeking to ensure her vision of restoration would continue in perpetuity, Juliet and her son Charles gifted the 13-acre Limahuli Garden to the PTBG — Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1994, the property grew to over 1,000 acres when Juliet’s grandson Chipper and his wife Hauoli gifted the entire valley to the Garden.

That Garden (now called NTBG) accepted the kuleana (responsibility) to malama (care for) the land as Juliet and others had done before. PTBG Director Dr. William Theobold recognized that because Limahuli had never been cultivated for large-scale agriculture, it held great promise for undiscovered native plant varieties, forms, and possibly even endemic species.

In 1977 Theobold called for the first-ever botanical survey of the valley, assigning the task to staff including Chipper who, at the encouragement of his grandmother, had completed the Garden’s internship in 1977 and was working as a head groundsman.

Hidden in the Valley

That summer Chipper, along with other staff, explored Limahuli’s deepest recesses, gullies, ridges and streamside. Among their findings: at least 88 Polynesian introduced and rare, endemic species including Lobeliods, Cyanea, Psychotria, native sandalwood (iliahi), ebony (lama), and many others.

Chipper reported finding two new color variations of Hibiscus saintjohnianus which had been previously identified as endemic to Kauai’s Na Pali Coast. The newly discovered forms (later classified as Hibiscus kokio subsp. saintjohnianus) extended the species’ known range and diversity.

In the PTBG Bulletin of January 1978, Chipper wrote: “One of the forms we found has bright orange petals with a creamy yellow, almost ivory colored staminal column, while another form has petals which are red with just a tinge of orange.”

In the late 1990s, noted wildlife photographers Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager spent months documenting life in the Hawaiian Islands for what would become their landmark book Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii. When they came to shoot in Limahuli Valley, they worked closely with Chipper.

Years later, Middleton recalled her introduction to kokio ulaula. “Chipper enthusiastically showed me what was clearly one of his favorites — a shrub with deep green leaves and striking orange flowers.”

Bold And Bright

Unlike other Hawaiian flora which she found to be subtle, even shy, kokio ulaula was bold and bright. Middleton remembers thinking, “stunning — a world class plant!”

“They must have taken 500 photographs…” Chipper said of the encounter. The shoot resulted in Limahuli’s brilliant orange hibiscus being featured prominently on the title page of the iconic book.

Decades later Middleton still associates the striking orange hibiscus with Chipper and the Limahuli Valley. Kokio ulaula, she says, represents “the exquisite beauty, elegance, and value of Hawai‘i’s rare native plants.”