Jardim Hawaii

A purple uluhe crozier beyond the rock wall looks toward the family house. 

The indigenous fern forks repeatedly and can take over the landscape if not kept in check.

"The rock wall has become its own ecosystem," Dad says after I ask him about three maidenhair ferns that have established on the wall fronting my family's Ola'a Forest property. 

The delicate fern is a family favorite — my brother says he remembers one wall of our grandparents' greenhouse in Kaimuki covered in them. I can't say where the nearest maidenhair fern is to this 12-year-old garden on the wet side of the island of Hawaii. The wild conditions, suited for ferns, orchids, mosses and lichens, are welcoming to traveling fern spores.

Another fern that makes its home on the rock wall is sweet-smelling laua'e. Introduced after 1778, Hawaiians readily used the fern to scent their kapa or bark cloth. 

Most of our stash of these ferns comes from the family's former O'ahu house and before that, Dad's parents' house. They grow from creeping rhizomes. It is a favorite for me and my sister.

 

Moss convention on the rock wall. 

Some of the plants and trees were purchased for this front yard garden, but most of it comes from cuttings or starts from friends and neighbors or public places. The remainder of the plants have just appeared and established on their own. 

This is another fern that just showed up. It looks related to laua'e, but I plan to check a reference book to try to identify it. See the maidenhair in the left background and other ferns to the right.

Ginger thrives here. This one looks ready to be divided. The flowers are so sweet, you can actually suck a drop of sugar from the flower stem.

 Dad said he planted the garden all those years ago to be a "grandmother's garden," meaning a place that looked like it was there for a long time and well loved. He said his guiding principle was to "plant plants on top of each other" so that as a person looks at the garden, they make discoveries. 

The garden is sloped up toward the rock wall and is anchored with several trees like koa, a native acacia (tallest tree) and kukui, the candlenut tree (tree in foreground) and tree-like plants like some large ti and the native tree fern, hapu'u (tall fern fronds are pushed up against the kukui in the foreground in the above photo).

In fact, the hapu'u is the scaffolding for much of this garden's variety. Here's moa, a whisk fern. It is growing on top of a fibrous hapu'u trunk. I believe moa has established on its own.

I love non-purple, non-pink flowers. These orchids are blooming on another hapu'u. Notice more moa to the botom left of the photo and peperomia to the bottom right. Peperomia is the main ground cover in this garden. It also grows up the rock wall. Bromeliads are above the flowers.

 More orchids on another hapu'u trunk and more peperomia. Many of the hapu'u in this garden were carried from other places on the property. On the island, there are sometimes cases of hapu'u theft.

Anthuriums, though not native, thrive on this wet side of the Big Island. You have to duck under and walk through other plants to see this anthurium with the long leaves. This one's warocqueanum.

This plant looked like plastic. Cast iron plant?

 

On the top road side of the garden, you can see how packed the garden is with plants and trees. A red ti (ti, not tea) leaf plant peeks out for some sun. 

The lava rock wall is the perfect substrate for ferns and moss.