Vegetable gardening, Honolulu style

There's a big community garden next to the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu.



Apparently, maintaining your garden plot is vital. Guy loved this sign; he wanted to move here and be in charge of it.



At first I thought this was a little over the top. But after I thought about it, I realized the growing season is 365 days long in Hawaii. If you don't stay on top of the garden chores, things could get out of control pretty fast.

Let's take a look at what people are growing.

















Ah, I grow this in my garden.



'African Blue' basil. Do you grow this too?



Ordinary basil, Ocimum basilicum, is an warm season annual that likes a little more warmth than San Francisco summers have to offer. It will grow here, but a lot of people grow this hybrid perennial instead, or as a supplement. In addition to potager service, it has showy flowers that attract bees. (I actually have a variegated form.)





So that's community gardening Honolulu. Let's now turn to home gardening. Guy's nephew's sister-in-law and her husband own a house in a very prim and trim development on Oahu's western side. They have a small garden, and grow some vegetables. (His name is Dave, so you could say this is, wait for it, Dave's garden!)



Seems like an innocent enough little garden, doesn't it? Well, it's illegal! Their neighborhood association forbids vegetable gardening! I can't imagine why. Produce in Hawaiian markets, shipped from the mainland United States, or wherever else, is expensive and shabby. Banning vegetable gardening seems downright un-American to me.









This pepper plant volunteered.





And this is papaya. Papaya with lemon juice is my favorite Hawaiian breakfast.

Foster Botanic Garden

A couple days after visiting the Koko Crater Botanical Garden, we visited the Foster Botanical Garden.

The brochure says "more than 75,000 visitors view the gardens annually" and I think that's a shame considering that Oahu's population is about 780,000 and five million people visit the island every year. Clearly, word has not gotten out.

I'm NOT starting off with a picture of the information guide crashed out at his desk. Please focus your attention on the fantastic display of nuts and seed capsules that grow here.



You can't grow these things in the temperate zone, and the trees are too big for a small garden anyway. And the trees at Foster are huge. Trees dominate the garden. There are only a few true shrubs and nothing a coastal gardener would recognize as "perennials" (unless I count bromeliads, crinums, and orchids). Mid-level plants are generally aroids and hibiscus.

Anyhow, back to those fruits and nuts:





The visual interest of reproductive parts in this climate is unbeatable. Ahem.





And I'm feeling a lot of love for visual textures here in general...





















Dead trunks adorned with bromeliads, mosses, orchids, and tillandsias serve as accent points throughout the garden.





But what impressed me more than anything else was the collection of trees.



Really big trees.









The Oahu County Arborist Committee has designated over 100 trees on the island as "exceptional by reason of age, rarity, location, size, aesthetic quality, endemic status or historical and cultural significance"; 24 of those trees are found in this garden, including enormous specimens of Adansonia digitata (Baobab), Enterolobium cyclocarpum (Earpod), Ceiba pentandra (Kapok), Cavanillesia platanifolia (Quipo), and most impressive during my visit, Couroupita guianensis, the Cannonball Tree.



And they mean it.





The garden brochure: "This member of the Brazil-nut family (Lecythidaceae) is native to Guiana. Note that the flowers are borne only on special stems on the main trunk. The heavy spherical fruit gives rise to the common name."





Besides being large and interesting, the flowers were powerfully and sweetly fragrant.



Finally, a post about the community garden outside the paid area of the Foster Botanical Garden.