Part 3 (1/2)

Bill functioned as the star, the front man who stroked the donors, while I cleaned up behind him as a glorified aide-de-camp. It fell to me to make rational sense of his grandiose projects, to put prices on them, then wrap them up in attractive packages. And I struggled. What could I say about the Garden, an inst.i.tution that had sold itself on its potential for thirty years? Other botanical gardens around the country operated as big businesses, with multimillion-dollar-per-year gift shops, rental fees for weddings, symphony evenings, lectures, and full education programs. We had none of those.

What is a botanical garden? The name has been applied to gardens ranging from extensive research facilities a.s.sociated with major universities and botanical inst.i.tutes to tiny munic.i.p.al parks that support little or no scientific activity. Many public and private ”display gardens” - such as Allerton Garden - contain superb plant collections but do not provide labeling or maintain records on the plants in their collections.

The official definition comes from the Botanic Gardens Conservation Strategy, published in 1989 by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. It states that a botanical garden contains ”scientifically ordered and maintained collections of plants, usually doc.u.mented and labeled, and open to the public for the purposes of recreation, education and research.”

NTBG didn't do well by those criteria either. Bill Klein had asked an old Air Force buddy and fellow botanist, Dr. Richard Mandell, to come out and survey the NTBG collections. He found that two-thirds of the plant holdings in the garden had lost their labels, had disappeared, and/or were of unknown provenance.

I flipped through a thick file. In 1989, the Garden won a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to botanize the islands, that is, send field researchers out to find out what plants and how many grew there. Botanical records for Hawaii date back to 1779, when amateur botanist David Nelson sailed with Captain Cook and collected samples, which he took back to England. But for the next two hundred years, much of the islands' difficult terrain lay unexplored by botanists.

All of the Garden's five botanists and horticulturists in the Plant Science Department functioned as field collectors. Two of them, Steve Perlman and Ken Wood, used climbing equipment to scale vertical cliff ledges and rock columns, reaching habitats and ecosystems never examined before by any man, much less a botanist. The last of the completely untouched Hawaiian landscape survives only on these breathtakingly narrow snippets of land and ledges, undisturbed by encroaching agriculture or feral pigs or goats.

Perlman and Wood produced impressive results. They discovered twenty-nine new plant species and rediscovered another twenty-two thought to be extinct. At the bottom of a page summarizing the Garden's explorations, I found a short paragraph set off, in smaller, agate type: Since 1990, NTBG has conducted 893 field expeditions throughout the Hawaiian Islands, atolls, and promontories. This is the most comprehensive survey of the Hawaiian Islands ever undertaken.

Eureka!

As I dug further, I discovered another unheralded factoid buried in Garden reports: A part-time nursery worker named Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger had developed growing methods for more than 75 percent of all native Hawaiian plants, another feat never before accomplished.

I could see a narrative: The Garden's daring explorers climbed remote regions of Hawaii to search for plants once thought extinct. They discovered lost species and brought back rare seeds to the botanical garden. There, the pioneering horticulturist coaxed life from them in experimental growing techniques. In the botanical garden, rare plants flowered in protection, ready to repopulate the earth.

Our north sh.o.r.e garden, Limahuli, was already attracting attention for its conservation efforts. I had immediately liked its young director, Chipper Wichman, who envisioned that the entire one-thousand-acre Limahuli Valley could be protected in its nearly pristine state, then used as a repository for rare nursery seedlings. Chipper, a boyish, lanky man in his forties, had shown such promise that Bill Klein further encouraged him as his logical successor to the entire NTBG empire.

ONE PLANT IN PARTICULAR, Brighamia insignis, showed how a brave plant hunter could single-handedly save a species. Steve Perlman had rescued this strange-looking plant with its bulbous base sprouting an elephant-skinned pole topped by a cabbage-like burst of foliage. In order to flesh out my story line, I frequently walked down the lanai to the Science Building to catch Perlman. I learned to look for piles of mud-stained backpacks outside his office, indicating that he had returned from a collecting trip.

”To me, Brighamia is a world cla.s.slooking plant,” Perlman enthused when I found him one day in the Garden's herbarium, the seed and dried specimen repository that always smelled of formaldehyde. ”They get a huge water storage base. They're six feet tall. The leaves are nothing much, but the flowers are.” The Brighamia insignis species on Kauai sends out waxy cl.u.s.ters of tubular flowers, lemon in color. On the sea cliffs of Molokai, its other primary habitat, another variety produces cream-colored flowers. ”Put it all together, it's a really spectacular-looking plant,” he said. ”I really like it.”

Perlman had arrived on Kauai in the 1970s, drawn by the surfing, a sport that almost took his life. A monster wave at Polihale Beach broke his neck a couple of decades ago. He recovered, and although he has since broken other small parts - toes, fingers, and a cracked rib - it never deterred him from either riding waves or climbing treacherous slopes.

He first worked on Kauai as a nurseryman on a private estate, spending his spare time hiking the island and learning its terrain. As he became enamored of the native Hawaiian plant story, he studied horticulture at Kauai Community College and enrolled in the first cla.s.s of student interns at the Garden, then named the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden. When the Garden hired him, he apprenticed himself to staff botanist Derral Herbst for field collecting trips. Herbst, more stout, didn't like to climb trees or cliffs, so Perlman scrambled up them. Fas.h.i.+oning a homemade harness and knotted ropes, he would attach one end to a st.u.r.dy tree at the top of a cliff, then rappel down. As he became more skilled and learned to use professional climbing gear, he embarked on his own field investigations, employing mules, boats, and helicopters to drop him off on islets and rock pinnacles to reach those inaccessible nether regions.

Now in his forties, Perlman had grown only more impa.s.sioned, if possible, about his mission to botanize the untrammeled islands of the Pacific. Sun had bleached his fringe of blond hair to almost white, in sharp contrast to a tan that seemed to seep down to the bone, making his blue eyes appear the color of lake ice. If he could choose, he'd spend most of his time in the field. Few can keep up with him on his explorations, or want to, as many trips involve weeks of rough camping. ”A lot of people can hike two or three days, but it's the fourth or fifth day on a trip that is the tough one,” he says.

I remembered my first botanizing trip, to the New Jersey Pine Barrens with Philadelphia botanist Ernest Schuyler, to research a story about a rare disappearing but nondescript gra.s.s. We tramped for hours through a hot haze of golden gra.s.s marshes, discovering sundews - insect-catching bog plants - and a myriad of gra.s.s sedges that all looked alike to my novice eye. After hours we sat down in the shade to rest, me fidgeting all the while. ”You're going to have to learn patience,” Schuyler told me.

Perlman first saw Brighamia insignis through binoculars as he stood, looking up, from the bottom of vertical sea cliffs on Kauai's Na Pali Coast. Two thousand feet above him, at the very edge of a rock ledge, a magnificent six-foot-tall specimen swayed back and forth on its bowling-pin-shaped base. Excited, Perlman shared his discovery with Harold St. John, chief botanist at Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum. St. John suggested trying to grow it, so in order to collect seeds, Perlman scrambled up the cliff and rappelled down into a drift of more than one hundred Brighamia plants. An intimate love affair began.

Throughout his career, Perlman regularly visited Brighamia populations. A few developed seeds, which Perlman collected and sent to botanists at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew; to Rancho Santa Anna Botanic Garden in California; and to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida. The botanists wrote back that they were successfully growing Brighamia.

But Perlman noticed that many of the Brighamia plants growing in the wild never produced seeds. They flowered, then the blossoms seemed to melt away without a trace. Fortunately, the plants were able to produce stamen heavy with golden pollen. So Perlman stepped in as surrogate father. He used a paintbrush, an old breeder's trick, to transfer pollen from the stamen on some plants into waiting pistils of others. A month later, he returned. It had worked. The plants developed fruit that ripened to seeds, giving him more to collect. He brought them back to the botanical garden.

FRENCH COLLECTOR JULES REMY first doc.u.mented the genus Brighamia in 1851 on the islands of Niihau, Kauai, Molokai, and Maui and named it after William Tufts Brigham (1841 1926), a geologist and early collector of Hawaiian plants. Although one of the large Lobeliaceae family in Hawaii, Brighamia is the only lobelia with a succulent stem and ancillary inflorescences, or soft branches, that carry erect flowers. The weighty base allows it to rock in the wind. The succulent green leaves feel somewhat rubbery and store water during drought. Horizontal roots can penetrate deep creva.s.ses in a sheer rock face.

The mere sight of a tall Brighamia can inspire awe but also a smile, because of its almost comical swollen base. In 1919, the botanist Joseph Rock recorded some specimens growing fifteen feet tall. More commonly it reaches three to six feet.

Perlman theorizes that very large moths once penetrated the six- to eight-inch-long flowers to serve as pollinators. Large sphinx moths - similar to those I thought were hummingbirds in my first days on Kauai - are likely candidates. Collectors used to commonly net Kauai's legendary green sphinx moth as it fluttered along the Na Pali Coast and across the high forests of Kokee State Park. But in the last fifty years, only twenty or so have been caught. Perlman believes that as Brighamia retreated to cliff edges, sphinx moths no longer ventured into the unprotected open where they could be s.n.a.t.c.hed by aggressive cardinals or white-eyes. Without its natural pollinator, the Brighamia withered away.

By this time Perlman had tracked Brighamia onto the highest sea cliffs in the world, on the smaller island of Molokai, home of the infamous Kalaupapa leper colony. There he found the Brighamia rockii (named after Dr. Rock) species. Again he used his paintbrush.

Perlman had seen reports by botanists working in the early 1900s that Brighamia also grew on Haupu, the mountain hump that looms over Kauai's south sh.o.r.e. For six years, he looked for them without success, hiking all around its foothills, even hiring a helicopter to drop him off at the summit.

One Sunday in the early 1980s, he attended a party at the Lihue home of Chipper Wichman's grandmother Juliet Rice Wichman, one of the early Garden trustees and an avid plants-woman. Perlman confided to her his quest to find the lost Brighamia on Haupu. She remembered a long-ago party held near the canoe club on the Huleia River, in 1917. A couple of boys from the Lydgate family paddled directly across the river and hiked partway up Mount Haupu. After about an hour, they returned holding big poles of plants - Brighamia!

Perlman immediately decided to retrace their route. He went to the canoe club, paddled a straight line across the river, and headed up a mountain gorge. Half an hour from the river, he approached a cliff, hiked around a corner, and found a small grove of Brighamia. That's how botanists work. Like detectives, they pore over the field notes of other botanists and herbarium records and pursue oral histories in order to track down plant populations.

Year after year, Perlman returned to the Haupu Brighamia drift of about a dozen plants. They served as the breeding stock for our botanical garden. Hurricane Iniki wiped them all out. One small plant survived alone in the Haupu gorge for a few years, but then it died. He used to get seeds from a few plants on Kauai near the ridge above Mahaulepu and the Kipu Kai gap, also on the south sh.o.r.e, but those plants also vanished after the hurricane.

Brighamia colonies are cras.h.i.+ng all over Hawaii.

Perlman is the first to admit that it's an uphill battle to convince people of the need to save rare and nearly extinguished plants. His local friends look at the Kauai jungles and don't see that the island's plants are in danger. It's all green, they say, not realizing that most of it nowadays is alien scheffleras, guavas, and other imports. In frustration, Perlman finally started to tell his friends that the native Hawaiian plants taste good in stir-fry, like bok choy. Only that convinced them that the plants were worth saving.

Selling the public on conservation of endangered species has never been easy - that's why a big mammal like a whale or giant panda gets to be the poster child for such campaigns. The plant people have tried to construct a worldwide database for tracking plant populations and storing seeds, but not much has been done for Hawaii, where scientific collaboration seems almost nonexistent and tropical seeds are too pulpy to last very long. Botanists in general have typically been a timid lot, usually confined to their dusty herbariums. That was the beauty of Bill Klein - he realized that only by engaging a wider public would anything really be accomplished. He saw the botanical garden's real role as education. ”People only will make an effort to save something they care about, and to care about it, they have to know about it,” he'd say.

Plants provide everything we humans need - the oxygen to breathe, crops to eat, grain to feed animals, even the fossil fuels we so greedily consume. There are many examples of obscure tropical rain forest plants that have proved to contain ingredients for valuable medicines or other uses. A native Hawaiian cotton plant, for instance, can't be spun into cloth, but was so disease resistant that commercial growers hybridized it to produce a stronger cotton.

The need to preserve the inhabitants, plant or animal, on Earth should be obvious enough; they exist, whether we humans have use for them or not. Who knows what we'll discover about them in the future? When tinkering with the machinery, don't throw any pieces away.

In my mind, just the very beauty of each species demands divine protection. We probably wouldn't miss the elimination of a trombone or two in a two-hundred-piece orchestra. But if you take away the oboes, then lose the violas, misplace the winds, and remove the cymbals, you begin to hear a meager, dull band instead of a symphony.

Over the last twenty years, Perlman has pollinated by brush at least one hundred Brighamia plants. His collected seed yielded thousands of plants grown in the Garden nursery that have been sent to other Hawaiian botanical gardens.

A lot of people became familiar with Brighamia's dramatic story thanks to the film Hidden Hawaii, which played at the Waikiki IMAX theater in Honolulu for more than a decade. The filmmakers pushed Perlman to exaggerate his cliff climbing, portraying him stretched spread-eagle across rocks and dangling more precariously from precipices than his usual cautious style. Now you can buy a T-s.h.i.+rt with a picture of the semi-ugly little cabbage plant, a symbol of plant rescue.

But the publicity hasn't helped save the plant.

”Pretty soon, all Brighamia will die out,” says Perlman. ”They are going very quickly and probably will be extinct in the wild in twenty years.”

PART TWO.

Digging In.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Chicken Skin.

NIGHTS IN THE Kleins' ohana, I delved into the literature of Hawaiiana. I plowed through the journals of Captain Cook's voyages aboard his s.h.i.+ps, Discovery and Resolution, then attacked Jack London. London first visited Hawaii in 1904, then returned several times with his second wife, Charmian. They frequented Waikiki, where London learned to surf. Incongruously, he lived on Oahu when he wrote ”To Build a Fire,” his most famous short story about death in Alaska's Arctic tundra. Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii recounted his own travels throughout the islands in 1866. Writing dispatches for The Sacramento Union, Twain bought a sorry-looking horse to ride up the volcanoes, tried his hand at surfing, and ate poi at luaus. Back then, Hawaii was a mythic land, occupying a position in the American conscious as a faraway paradise of savages and bare-breasted beauties.

But it was Isabella Lucy Bird to whom I kept returning. Bird grew up a semi-invalid and amateur botanist, the spinster daughter of an English clergyman. A spinal deformity required her to lie down much of the time, and depression sometimes kept her in bed all day. In 1872, the year she turned forty, she sailed on a recuperative cruise to the South Seas. A typhoon damaged her s.h.i.+p, and it limped into Honolulu Harbor. While the s.h.i.+p underwent repairs, so did she. For six months she explored the islands on horseback in what became a life-changing experience, then a book published under the t.i.tle Six Months in the Sandwich Islands. Throwing off the restraints of a refined Victorian lady, Bird trekked by mule up the icy mountainside of Mauna Loa on the Big Island. She galloped the coast of Kauai at midnight, alone, and visited its enchanted rain forests. No camping in huts or long rides were too rough.

Many of her detailed accounts describing the Hawaiian flora and its lush jungle landscapes rent with pouring waterfalls were still accurate more than one hundred years later. Her writing helped me imagine nineteenth-century Hawaii, as well as understand it today. But it was her life story that intrigued me. I had only its briefest outlines. She never returned to Hawaii but went on to travel through Korea, Persia, j.a.pan, and elsewhere, becoming the foremost British woman travel writer of her era.

”Her last years were sad, indeed,” wrote Terence Barrow, Ph.D., in the foreword to a 1974 paperback edition of her Hawaii book. Barrow recounted how Bird had married after Hawaii, but her husband died within five years. She lived out the next decades in loneliness, he said. Even with this sketchy information, I questioned whether we were hearing Barrow's personal views on the suitable life for ladies, or Isabella's own a.s.sessment. Any woman who had thrown off the shackles of convention, galloped alone at midnight through jungle ravines, and then went on to travel for the next thirty years on the back of yak, pony, mule, or stallion did not strike me as a woman paralyzed by early widowhood and sentenced to bleak loneliness.

Sad, indeed, eh? I rankled at this presumption that the most celebrated female travel writer of the nineteenth century lived unfulfilled, despite her unorthodox success. Or was it precisely because of her unorthodox life you drew this conclusion, Mr. Terence Barrow, Ph.D.?