Waking Up in Eden (12 page)

“I found these in the tall grass down on Lawai-Kai,” John said. “By the Hawaiian graveyard. Would you like them?”

“Oh, John, would I ever! Are you sure you want to give them up?”

John smiled in satisfaction. When he left, I placed the balls on my desk, positioning them so they would catch the light. The Coke bottle–green globes seemed to hold the ocean, with frozen bubbles of spray. So fragile, but strong enough to be tossed on waves and thrown ashore. Later, Dr. Klein came into my office, papers in hand. “Look what John gave me,” I showed him.

Dr. Klein beamed. “You've found a friend!”

W
EEKS PASSED WHEN
it seemed like I never left the office. Like a hamster in a wheel, I churned out reports, brochures, grant proposals, campaign materials, and thank-you letters to donors. Lost was an earlier vow to go down to the Garden grounds every day, if only for ten minutes. I felt guilty that I wasn't riding Bo enough. But one morning I impulsively shut off the computer and walked out the door, hurrying down the lanai along the front of the office before anyone could stop me with a phone call or question. Only Henry, the rooster who stalked the office entrance looking for handouts, saw me.

Shifting the car into low gear to drive down the steep grade and sharp curves into the Lawai Valley, I swooped past a grove of young
Pritchardia,
native Hawaiian palms, then curved around a bend to fly past the water lily pond. A gray gallinule, or Hawaiian coot, darted in and out of the pink flowers and lily pads.

The road followed the Lawai Stream under overhanging red rock cliffs to an old plantation railroad bridge that obscured the view of any oncoming cars. I honked my horn to warn approaching vehicles, then splashed through six inches of water. The Garden hadn't yet solved the problem of a stream running
across its sole access road. I parked at Pump Six, the former irrigation station that housed the Garden's carpentry shop, offices for the grounds foremen, and whatever else could be crammed under its termite-ravaged rafters. Behind its red barn, three tents of green cloth formed the nursery.

As I entered the shade, I knew that this was what I had missed — a connection to plants, the feel of the humid, languid air that conspired with hot tropical sun, daily rain showers, and rich soil to produce the vivid tropical flora of Hawaii. Dr. Klein called the nursery “the Emergency Room,” site of the Garden's most significant plant-rescue work. Rows of waist-high tables held hundreds of seed flats and pots, all color-coded: yellow tags for common plants. Blue for rare. Red for federally listed endangered species. Most of the tags were red.

“Hi, Simon,” I called to the shy black-and-white cat that snoozed between two pots on a far table. He roused himself to quickly escape under the table. Rats used to sneak in at night and gorge themselves on all the rare seeds before they sprouted, until Simon arrived. Now we honored him as an important staff member.

The nursery manager, a tall woman with carrot-colored hair named Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger, rose to greet me from a rain-stained wooden desk in the back. Her steady, frank eyes could shoot sparks if provoked. I felt a kinship with her and we smiled easily. We were both loners of a sort, and outsiders at the Garden. Kerin worked by herself, without benefit of mentor or instructor, perennially battling the rest of the staff. The Garden's glamorous plant hunters Steve Perlman and Ken Wood returned from field trips around Hawaii or other Pacific isles and dumped bags of seeds on her desk, booty from their
explorations. “Always the seeds are given to me with no instructions,” she'd rail. “Here's a bag of seeds, Kerin, go at it,” they'd say. Sometimes she'd plead, “Give me at least a hint. Did they grow in mesic forest or rain forest?”

We walked to the front of the nursery to inspect two high wooden planters. Each container cradled a low-growing shrub, with crooked branches and tiny, parsimonious leaves. Like most native Hawaiian plant species, it didn't look like much. Yet this was one of the Garden's big success stories. Perlman and Wood had discovered the last two known specimens of this scraggly bush on the small, degraded Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe, used over the last fifty years by the U.S. military as a practice bombing target. By chance, the two collectors climbed over to a stone column that did not look as if it had ever been botanized. Perlman lowered Wood by rope down to a small ledge, where he found two skeletal plants. When they brought a sample back to the botanical garden for identification, it initially mystified the staff botanists. They pronounced it to belong to a new genus never before seen in Hawaii, and named it
Kanaloa kahoolawensis
. Ken and Steve collected a few seeds and brought them to Kerin.

“The most difficult problems for me are these real rare plants,” she said. “They won't grow from cuttings or air-layering. Basically they kill themselves. It's like hybrid fruits — they become so hybrid that they are asexual or sterile and can't reproduce.” But she succeeded in growing
Kanaloa kahoolawensis,
and she was the only one who ever had. Seeds had also been sent to Lyon Arboretum on Oahu to be cloned and grown in test tubes. Yet despite Lyon's state-of-the-art techniques that worked well on other species, those seedlings died. The roots just spiraled round and round, cramped in glass tubes.

Kerin studied seeds to divine their requirements. In the case of the Kahoolawe plant, she immediately recognized a legume (bean) seed and knew from experience that it needed scarification, a nick in the shell to allow the germ within to escape. She then figured out that the plant had adapted to long periods of drought by sending out unusually deep roots. She was surprised by its speedy growth. It germinated in a day and a half in a tiny seed flat. By the end of the week it needed a one-gallon pot, and after that, progressively deeper containers.

By successfully growing two of the seedlings into bushes, she doubled the world's population, from two to four. Even so, they only survived here in captivity as museum pieces.

“Are the Hawaiian native species going to be saved at all?” I asked.

“Only in zoos, like the botanical garden. Not in the wild,” she said. “The odds are against them. Totally. Goats, sheep, rats, deer, maile and mokihana hunters who plunder the forests for lei making, all are destroying the rarities. I'm like a Band-Aid. It's unrealistic to think we're going to bring them back to a preserve and they'll be able to repopulate. But I accept the zoos.”

Near the garden entrance, dozens of
Brighamia
plants, now the Garden's unofficial mascot, flourished. Some towered above us, germinated by Kerin from tiny seeds, half the size of a sesame seed. I told her: “When I was up at Kilauea Lighthouse last weekend I saw that they have whole beds of
Brighamias
. Hundreds. Are they all yours?”

“They all started here. From the first, mother plant, I grew three or four hundred. I used to grow whole flats of
Brighamia
and give them away, and gave demonstrations on how to transplant them.” Again, Kerin had succeeded because she tried to
analyze conditions from the seed's point of view. “I used to ask: Where are the seeds going?” she explained. “The
Brighamia
plants were growing on cliff crevices, so naturally the seeds were falling down the cliffs into the ocean. Where else could they go? But once we brought them back here for cultivation, they started flowering and producing.” Kerin disputes Steve Perlman's theory that
Brighamia
solely depends on the endangered sphinx moth for pollination. Here at the botanical garden, the
Brighamia
are engaging in all sorts of sex, pressing an unknown number of pollinators into action — birds, bees, and perhaps other moths.

T
HE
G
ARDEN OFFERED
a respite for Kerin, an antidote to a brain-numbing bartending job at Brennecke's upstairs bar on Poipu Beach. It wasn't the first time I questioned whether we were saving the plants, or they were saving us. In her offhours, she had started volunteering at the Garden, first growing plants for a monthly giveaway program. She puzzled that she was asked to grow exclusively nonnatives such as ti or plumeria. When she arrived, the National Tropical Botanical Garden did not possess many native Hawaiian plants. Everything was imported from tropical regions around the Pacific, India, or Africa. Incredibly, the Garden had only six
Pritchardia,
the native Hawaiian palms. Kerin set out to change that. As her interest grew, she attended horticulture classes at Kauai Community College. The more she learned, the more curious she became. Yet she couldn't find a single text for growing native plants. She resolved to grow all one thousand native Hawaiian species.

After the Garden hired her as a part-time nursery manager she formulated her own classifications, dividing seeds into three
types: pulpy, dry, or hard, which need to be stripped manually. Obviously, in nature, no humans perform this work, but a rat might do the job of gnawing away the hard seed coat, or it may be nicked by pebbles when rolling down a stream bed, or eaten by a bird or animal, digested, and excreted. Initially, Kerin divided hard seeds into test groups, soaking them for one, twelve, thirty-six, or seventy-two hours. After six years of experimentation, she discovered that a twenty-four-hour bath was ideal for most: the duration of a good, hard rain. In her experiments with
mokihana,
a native vine that grows in high, wet mountain areas, she found that the seeds needed to be soaked for five days and fermented for another three months. “Nobody thinks about soaking
for five days,
” she says. “If I weren't a patient person I wouldn't have succeeded.” She plants seeds from each species in as many as twelve different soil mixes before she hits the right formula of soil, temperature, and water.

Eventually, Kerin deduced methods to grow 870 of the 1,000 native Hawaiian plant species — all except those so rare she couldn't obtain seeds. “I grew them from the heart,” she says. “I really, really wanted them to grow.” After five years of hard work, Kerin inventoried the Garden's new native plant section and found that only a quarter of what she had grown had survived. To her distress and volcanic rage, she discovered flats of her seedlings parked under bushes, never planted and dead. The groundsmen became used to her furies and shrugged them off. But she acknowledges that the biggest problem was not the ground crew's lack of diligence. It was the hot, windless Lawai Valley. The Garden had no nurseries at higher elevations that could harbor mountain plants that needed cool breezes and
nighttime conditions near freezing. No wet rain forests could be replicated at the Garden, either.

Only one person on Kauai, or for that matter, in all of Hawaii, knew how to transplant endangered species seedlings into the landscape and keep them alive: the hermit Keith Robinson. Keith acted as a one-man plant-rescue operation who tended his Outlaw Plant Preserve, a hidden garden of the rarest Hawaiian plants. According to rumors, it was a marvel, eleven miles from civilization, an evocation of how the island terrain looked one thousand years ago, filled with native palms, flowering hibiscus, and other trees and shrubs that have all but vanished elsewhere. He reportedly does all the work by hand, including carrying water in buckets from a stream.

In defiance of federal and state authorities, Robinson hikes into state forests and other government-protected land, snatches seeds, and digs up plants. In the privacy of his preserve he fusses over them until they bloom into prize specimens. Unlike Susan Orlean's now famous orchid thief John Laroche, who stole orchids for no apparent reason other than the obsession to possess, Robinson was the Robin Hood of the endangered species world. He stole to save them. Every once in a while Robinson emerges, on a radio show or at a public hearing, to rant against government interference, the “eco-Nazis,” the Endangered Species Act, the federal government, and especially the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1993, curiosity overcame Garden botanist Ken Wood, who trespassed onto Robinson land. Robinson men armed with rifles surprised Wood, marched him down to the Waimea Police Station, and filed a trespassing complaint.

Robinson himself carried a pistol or machete, and was convinced that a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to protect endangered species on Kauai was a plot to seize his preserve. He swore to shoot anyone who tried.

I had seen a disturbing copy of Robinson's latest missive sent to Hawaii's U.S. congressmen. He wrote that in order to foil the government's planned “takeover,” he would render his land useless by turning it into an enormous weed patch. He threatened to seed his family's entire watershed “with highly aggressive nonnative wetland vines, to replace this dangerous native ecosystem with a more benign nonnative one that will not attract all sorts of spying, trespassing, meddling, environmentalist bullying, and government seizure attempts.”

Stay away from my preserve, he warned, or he would let loose all the alien species that were already trampling Kauai: banana poka, Japanese honeysuckle, Australian acacia, blackberry, cat's claw, kudzu, and the most dreaded of all,
Miconia
.

Although he sounded odd, even disturbing, I was intrigued and wanted to see what he had accomplished.

W
AIST-DEEP IN
the chill ocean, I pulled on my rubber fins, rubbed spit in my mask, rinsed it, strapped it on, and sank below the surface. Fish swam close, even in knee-high shallows. I paddled alongside a school of pale yellow- and black-striped convict tangs. A Picasso triggerfish with baby blue nose and geometric markings bounced lazily along the rocky floor. In this silent realm, the fish seemed oblivious to anything but the possibility of food or danger. My slow stroke offered neither, so they were unconcerned. Once I was submerged, the initial cold shock mellowed to a comfortable coolness.