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.

Koko Crater

We spent Thanksgiving weekend visiting Guy's nephew in Oahu. We visited the Koko Crater Botanical Garden in the southeast corner of the island, about 10 miles east of Diamond Head, and a mile north of Hanauma Bay (as the nene flies).

This is a dry landscape in a southern rainshadow. The garden is young, admission is free, and tours are self-guided. The collection features bouganvillea, plumeria, dryland palms, cacti, cycads, and a grove of young baobab trees (among other things). Many of the most of the interesting specimens have accession tags.

Here are some pictures.





Here is the plumeria's fruit--elongated capsules, 10 inches long--but I still can't figure out the sex parts.



Euphorbia milii. You can grow this outdoors in San Francisco (and I do), but it's so much more impressive in low desert gardens.



Agave attenuata. I was surprised to see this plant all over Oahu, because I've never seen it in Kauai (the Hawaiian island I visit most often).





What looked like some Euphorbia hung from trees like Spanish Moss.



This went on for acres.







(Note Nolina texana in the background.)









Even small baobabs (Adansonia) make very impressive specimens, and Koko Crater has dozens.



I'll be excited come back here every few years to monitor their progress.




A couple days later we visited the Foster Botanical Garden, Hawaii's crown jewel of botanic gardens.

An article about perennial vegetables, with lots of links.

"She is a nice, warm, friendly animal, the cow."

Link.

Here are two people

that I have absolutely no interest in ever reading about or seeing pictures of, ever. For the rest of my life.

For whatever reason, the media seems intent on manufacturing and servicing a desperate need in the heart of every man, woman, and child for new news about John Kennedy and Jackie O.

I want to a lone voice speaking truth to power (into the ethereal nothingness of the Internet): No, I am not interested. I do not care. I have never cared. I will never care. Seeing pictures and headlines about these people make me want to flee. I very much doubt there are two people in the world that I would be less interested in reading about or seeing pictures of.

I just want that to be clear.

Living with a vegetarian, it's no surprise that I've eaten at every vegetarian restaurant mentioned in this New York Times article Expanding the Frontiers of the Vegetarian Plate, currently ranked #7 on that website's list of most e-mailed articles. I can think of a few more vegetarian restaurants to choose from in San Francisco, but the article got all the big ones.

Our favorite is Millennium.

The one I would most like to get back to some day is Cha-Ya. We ate there once when it first opened.

I can only imagine people who don't live here must find the critic's description of the Cha-Ya dining experience quite...amusing. (I know it makes me laugh, and I live here.)

Starting with shira ae ($5.50), a salad of blanched and delicately pickled vegetables served atop a thick sesame tofu dressing. Slices of lotus root and rubbery yam cake added a seafoody aroma to the beans, pressed spinach, shiitakes, and rapini. Cha-Ya's kitchen is adept at imparting umami flavors without resorting to the usual fish-based ingredients. The miso soup was richly savory, and the Cha-Ya roll ($6.75), a lightly fried inside-out roll of asparagus and carrot drizzled in thick, sweet sauce, was deeply satisfying.

Each dish was perfectly prepared. The vegetables in the sushi rolls (we had asparagus, eggplant, mushroom, and rapini nigiri rolls ($3.50 each), and avocado and mushroom uramaki ($5.25) had been cooked to the moment of perfection. A bowl of kinoko udon soup ($7.75) was heavy with chunky mushrooms: enoki, shimeji, oyster and shiitake. The broth, and the noodles, were good enough to imagine climbing into the big stoneware bowl.

Guy hated Cafe Gratitude (too hippy-dippy), but I went to UC Santa Cruz. I graduated with an abiding revulsion of the Grateful Dead, but crackers of dehydrated raw seed, and cheesecake dyed with green algae? No problem.

As far as food goes, I'm much more adventurous with vegetarian fare than I ever am with meat. I will at least try anything that grows out of the ground (or grew on something that grew out of the ground, e.g., fungi). But never will any dead animal creature's liver, kidney, heart, brain, foot, tongue, stomach, intestine, or any reproductive organ, ever pass my lips.

Bloom Day Is Ready (was Will Be Late)

Bad news: I splattered my whisky and setlzer on my computer keyboard a couple days ago, and had to send it in for service. In the meantime, how to get pictures from my camera onto Guy's computer is not immediately obvious. So blogging will be slow for the next few weeks. Plus, I'm going to Hawaii next weekend. Hopefully I'll have Bloom Day up in the next couple of days. Monday at the latest.

Fortunately, this is not exactly a thrilling month for flowers in the garden. I have a lot of purple heliotrope, two abutilon (one white, one apricot), purple penstemon, and a scarlet epilobium all in full bloom. The Hardenbergia vine is pregnant with buds, and the manzanita flower buds are starting to swell. Tibouchina urvilleana responded to a heavy tip pruning by making dozens of new buds.

ADDED: pictures of some November blooms.











Link to last month's Bloom Day post.