Starting Over in Hawaii

I once deemed my work as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer the apogee of existence. But as cataclysmic changes started undermining the newspaper industry, I felt at a dead-end, stymied. Many of my colleagues faced similar midlife angst, professional and personal. What to do now with our brightly-educated minds, expensively toned bodies and elongated life spans that promised another thirty or forty years of active life?
An unexpected job offer arrived and I leapt at the chance to move to Hawaii, work at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and indulge a fascination with plants.

Friends in Philadelphia threw a good-bye luau, complete with roast pig. Girlfriends danced a hula enacting the story of Lucinderella as she bid Aloha Oe to traffic jams and meddlesome editors. They prepared the traditional send-off gift, a mock front page. The headlines read: Whirlwind Lucinda Kauai Bound; Islanders Beware, Fleeson En Route.

My new job at the National Tropical Botanical Garden included housing on a five-acre property atop a plateau. To reach it, one drove up a long hill. Giant, feathery bamboo trees enclosed the drive, their soaring branches meeting to form a Gothic tunnel. As the car ascended through the bam¬boo arches, I felt as if I were entering the nave of a filigreed, green cathedral. So perfect was the Gothic illusion that I found myself listening for anthems and the crescendo of organs.

My plantation cottage was more remote and rustic than I had anticipated. Perched on stilts, one edge overlooked a jungle ravine, so that a wide expanse of windows opened straight into treetops. It had a childlike appeal, like a grownup’s tree house. The vastness of the property and its wondrous seclusion drew me in. From the front porch, one could not see an¬other house. It was as if I were in a sanctuary.

My office at the National Tropical Botanical Garden gave me a terrarium-like view into a bed of tropical plants, which appeared gigantic and extraterrestrial to my temperate-zoned eyes. Clusters of maroon flowers emerged from the center of a five-foot-tall plant. Two hummingbirds beat rapidly in and out of its juicy petals. A lucky omen? My job was to raise money to fuel the Garden’s plans for a building and scientific program that would put the organization in the forefront of tropical botany and native plant conservation.

The Garden centerpiece was Allerton Garden, a 100-acre estate carved out of former sugar cane fields and jungle by two Chicago millionaires who stumbled on one of the most private coves in all of Hawaii and bought it in 1938. Their beach house resembled a giant porch, enclosed on all sides by screened lanais. It was an iconic vision of a rich man’s paradisiacal hideaway – calm, inviolate, alluring in its secretiveness. I was determined to pierce the mystery of why Robert and John Allerton had escaped from Chicago to build a new life here. And I did. . . but that’s a long story.

After hours when all the visitors had gone home, I liked to go down and wander through Allerton Garden. Here is a photo of a crimson torch ginger (Etlinger elatior) in one of my favorite spots – the Cutting Garden, a maze of tall tropical flowers. But the blooms have nothing to do with the Hawaiian flora. All the showy tropical flowers that foreigners think spill from every corner in Hawaii were imported from other tropical regions of the world. These waxy torches? They had originally come from Indonesia. Flashy purple, pale green, and snowy white orchids? Also imports, from India, New Zealand and Brazil. Showers of cerise bougainvillea or plumeria? Central and South America. The native Hawaiian plants are rather dowdy and modest, most with tiny flowers. The average visitor to Hawaii rarely sees a native plant.

NTBG plant hunters like Steve Perlman scale mountains and brave jungles to find rare species and bring back seeds. Here I accompanied him on a hike into the Limahuli Valley Preserve on Kauai’s northern coast. We searched for seeds from the elusive, white-flowering Hibiscus Waimeae, subspecies Hannarea. Botanists reported this endangered plant was extinct until the 1970s when Steve discovered one hundred and fifty plants here and in the neighboring Hanakapia Valley. Although the hibiscus produces thousands of blooms, it doesn’t develop much fruit. Previously, Steve had collected enough of its seed to propagate seventy seedlings in the nursery. A restoration crew carefully air-lifted them by helicopter up the mountain, and camped out for three days to transplant them. So far, nearly every single one survives.

I was captivated by the story of Brighamia Insignius, a funny looking plant resembling a cabbage on a pole. Steve Perlman first saw Brighamia through binoculars as he stood under soaring cliffs of Kauai’s Na Pali coast. Later he climbed to it there and on other remote mountain sides. He noticed that while the plant produced flowers, it never produced seed. He theorized that a giant sphinx moth had pollinated it, but that the moth had disappeared. He stepped in to do the job, using a paint brush to pollinate the flowers. When the flowers produced seed, he collected it and brought it back to the botanical garden, where hundreds of the plants were successfully grown, and now populate gardens throughout Hawaii.

The plant pictured is one of the only two remaining individuals of genus endemic to the Hawaiian islands. Steve Perlman and his field partner discovered Kanoala in 1992 an isolated sea stack off the southern cliffs of the islet Kaho’olawe. All attempts with air layers, cuttings, and tissue culture have failed. Only a nursery worker at NTBG succeeded in propagating this plant, from seed. This plant resides at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai; only one lone survivor continues to hang on in the wild.

As I explored the Hawaiian plant crisis and hunted down garden history, I realized that I was, and always will be, a reporter at heart. My Hawaiian journey was fun, inspiring and transformational. In the end, it returned me to journalism, but in a new sphere. And once I had taken such a big leap, the next were much, much easier. I spent several years training journalists overseas, in Eastern and Central Europe, Africa and Latin America. Now I direct a program for international journalists at the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and teach writing and reporting. That’s the short version. The full story is in my new memoir: WAKING UP IN EDEN.
You can find more at www.lucindafleeson.com Mahalo!