I started this post 3 times, first focusing on the weeds, then focusing on the natives plants of Hawaii, the former pretty easy to see, actually hard to avoid, and the latter requiring a certain amount of effort to find. But with recent developments on the Big Island and the volcanic activity in the eastern rift zone of Kilauea Volcano I shifted gears.
This past April we went back to Kapoho in that zone, and it’s lovely tide pools to celebrate my 60th birthday. Little did we know that a few months later the whole place would be erased by lava.
This was my third trip to the southeastern corner of the Island of Hawaii and I have developed a certain attachment to the place. We liked staying at Kapoho for its rural setting and the proximity to the hiking opportunities of Volcanoes National Park and the lush Ola’a Forest Preserve, as well as the lovely tide pools.

The little ocean front community of Kapoho became our home, of sorts; we formed a quick attachment and fostered dreams of maybe moving there one day. The dreams died this past week as Kapoho was taken by the volcano. It seems almost silly to talk of grieving for a place only visited twice. And the grief I am feeling is unspecific.

While I was there I read “Ghosts of the Tsunami” By Richard Lloyd Parry, about the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan. One day I wrote down this quote from the book in my note book: “ It is easy to imagine grief as ennobling, purifying emotion—uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything anymore than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress, and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, cracks into gapping chasms.
Each day with tsunamis haunting my mind I looked out to the ocean wondering when it would come and wash this all away. I should have been looking over my shoulder; the wave that was coming was pure hot lava.

I had read Frances K. Kakugawa’s “KAPOHO: Memoir of a Modern Pompeii”, the story of her growing up a Japanese-American in the sugar plantation town of Kapoho back in the 40s and 50s, before it was destroyed by lava in 1960. It was hard to imagine such devastation happening again. The “new” Kapoho was a quiet rural community of residents and vacationers. It was surrounded by small orchid and papaya farms; we would stop at roadside stands to buy fresh cheap papayas and avocados.
Each evening I would walk around the community enjoying the gardens and swatting mosquitoes. I even met a few of the locals and talked to them about their experience of living there. I can’t imagine what they are going through now, absolutely helpless against the slow advance of the lava, and absolutely homeless now that the lava has passed through. My grief is partly for them, partly from the dream I had of finding home there too. And partly for the beauty that was that place on the most eastern tip of the Hawaiian Islands.
As a way of working off some grief I have decided to change the focus of this post to the vanished gardens and plants of Kapoho.
The original village of Kapoho was destroyed by a lava flow in 1960. The new developments were built directly on those lava flows. The gardens of the community, grown lush over the years, disguised this lands provenance. But just beyond this gardened oasis there were scrublands and still raw lava fields. I wandered these areas, too, looking for native plants.
I have been trying to under stand the flora of Hawaii for a few decades now. It would probably be going a lot faster if I went more often. My trips there are widely spaced, but I do spend a good deal of time in between visits reading and webbing, trying to get a deeper sense of what I see.
The flora of Hawaii is a mess. According to the 1990 “Manual of Flowering Plants of Hawaii” there are 1817 species of plants on the Hawaiian Islands. 956 or 53% are native, which means 47%, or nearly half the flora, is weeds. On my first visit all I saw was Hawaiian plants, but in my subsequent visits I became more interested in the native plants of the islands.
The archipelago has seen numerous colonizing events since it emerged from ocean floor so long ago. Winds, birds and waves brought the first plants to the island. Polynesians, arriving between 300-500 A.D., brought the next wave: bananas, sugar cane and taro, along with pigs, rats and chickens. In 1778 the first Europeans arrived, over time these colonizers brought plants from the tropical Americas and Africa, creating the current chaotic flora of the islands. Some plants that have arrived since this last colonization have had devastating impacts on the native flora, as well as the European goats and sheep.
I will not try to tweeze apart this flora in this post, though I spent a good deal of time seeking out native plants, and trying to understand the provenance of the others. I want to create just a little picture memoir of a place that is gone

The following series of pictures taken in April are of plants and places which are now buried under meters of lava.

The gardens of Kapoho, poised between the rough coast and the scrublands and farms on the old lava fields, were lush and beautiful, a testament to hard-working gardeners who moved on to these barren soils years ago, and brought life to them.

I had admired this white hibiscus on my first trip there, and the wild garden that it grew in. This time I got to meet the gardener. Mars had been gardening in Kapoho since the late 70s. She had designed and planted many of the gardens in the community.

She had planted several of the Bismarck palms (Bismarckia nobilis) in the area. From the aerial news reports of the lava flows we could see them easily, there silver canopies stood out among the green. I remember how proud she was, I wonder now how she feels now…
Just recently I was talking to a friend about what might happen to the trees I planted. I will never see them get old; they may well succumb to the chainsaw of the next owner of my property before they get old. It made me a bit sad. I wonder how Mars might feel now knowing all she had planted was gone a in a few days. We had planned to meet again so I could see her whole garden, a jungle of curiosities I only saw from the road. We never connected, or shared contact information.
(if you see this post Mars please let me know you are okay)

Another local I talked to had turned the rocky lava soils of his lot into a food oasis.
Under his bananas (Musa x paradisiaca)was a ground cover of sweet potatoes and kabocha squash.

Another resident grew papayas, my favorite fruit.

And pineapples, my other favorite fruit, out of practically pure rock.

Coconuts are weeds, sprouting up everywhere. Nearly every tropical place I have visited boasts of coconuts as theirs. There origin, thought to be somewhere in the Old World tropics, is long lost behind this plants peregrinations both with humans and on the open waves

Coconuts were brought to the islands by the Polynesians over a millennia ago, though they were less important than kukui, or candlenut, (Aleurties moluccana)which they also brought to the island
This one grew in pure lava outside our beach house, flowering and fruiting all at once.

Guava (Psidium guajava) and

Noni (Morinda citrifolia)

and the insidiously invasive strawberry guava (Psidium littorale var. cattleianum), all brought to the islands for fruit production, made up a large portion of the scrublands surrounding Kapoho.

Still I found many natives, like Ākia (Wikstoemia phillyreifolia) an endemic to the Island of Hawaii, growing there, too.

And the lovely endemic ōhi’a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), one of the first colonizers of lava flows and the most widespread tree of the archipelago, can be seen on all of the main Hawaiian Islands from sea level to about 8,200 feet.

There were also some charming weeds among the scrublands, like the Philippine ground orchid (Spathiglottis plicata), brought to Hawaii in the 1920s as a garden ornamental and now widespread, but hardly invasive.

And field paint-brush (Castilleja arvensis) native from southern California into Central America.

What I was reminded of as I looked through my pictures was that Kapoho and its surroundings were all just bare lava flows with a tenuous thin mantle of green. And that plants are tough. This unidentified grass not only grew out of lava rock but also was inundated with salt water twice a day. And it made little pockets of soil for other plants to get started.

Like naupaka kahakai (Scaevola taccada) growing on lava outcrops in the Kapoho tide pools.

Naupaka’s lovely half-flower.

A screwpine (Pandanus tectorius) seed will lodge into holes in the cooled lava one day, like they had time and time again on these, and many other pacific islands.

A new colonization will begin, help rebuild the soils and flora, yet again.

Ohi’a lehua due to its red flowers like spewing lava is sacred to Pele, goddess for fire and volcanoes. It is not surprising that ōhi’a are one of the first plants after mosses and ferns to colonize open, cooled lava fields. This image was taken on the flanks of Mauna Loa,I imagine this plant is still there.
Ohi’a flowers were and are still used to relieve the pain of childbirth. In a way the lava flows we’ve been watching each night on TV are a birth, new land is being born. Just like the shelf of lava that our vacation rental stood on was new land some 60 years ago.
It seems strange to greet birth with grief, even this unspecified strange grief for a place not home yet not foreign. It seems glib to offer hope to those who have lost both home and income. And those who wait to hear daily where the lava will hit next. I can’t imagine their losses as I sit in my comfortable home and listen to birds sing through the open window. I hope though for those who have lost, that space for hope will come to them.
I know one day the plants will return to the burned and buried landscape of Kapoho, Leilani Estates and all the other areas of the eastern riff zone of Kilauea, as if nothing had happened. And this little hope born of my grief imagines me walking on these new lava flows, cooled and verdant once again, enjoying the messy Hawaiian flora.

It is hard to look at this picture and think: weed. Yet, Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is by far the greatest number of tree seedlings I pull during my days of gardening. It is a pioneer species, meaning it colonizes open ground. Arthur Kruckeberg in his classic “Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest” says Doug firs are “so common and so successfully self-perpetuating… that scarcely anyone thinks of propagating it intentionally for ornamental use”. He goes on to describe it virtues for two more pages. Though any of you who have gardened with, I mean under, them know the pitfalls. They rob the soil of moisture drop needles perpetually, and are brittle, dropping twiglets in a breeze and giant limbs in a gale. A global tree census in 2015 numbered 422 living trees per person on the planet. In the Pacific Northwest I bet a vast proportion of those trees are Doug-firs.

By shear ubiquity, they are nearly invisible, a dark backdrop to our busy Northwest lives.

Some people drag home every little puppy or kitten they find. My heart softens for tree seedlings. I gently pry them from the ground and pot them up for planting elsewhere in the future. My raggle-taggle nursery of misshapen trees is a testament to this bad habit. Kruckeberg recommends collecting seedling as the best way to propagate Doug-fir, though I doubt many of you will rush out to dig them for your garden. The many dwarf and variegated cultivars, he rued, are only available in Europe.

As I drove around looking for photogenic Doug-firs for this post, it became increasingly evident to me how extrememly ubiquitous they are, and how spontaneous.
Our local variety is called Coast Doug-fir (P. menziesii var menziesii) and can grow well over 300 feet and live for 500 to 1000 years. Arthur Lee Jacobsen writes, “Seattle owed its early economic health to this tree”. It is still the most widely grown timber tree in the U.S. And ranks high globally.

These forest giants have been planted, and have naturalized, in Europe, Chile, and New Zealand. In the latter they have become an invasive species. I walked through forests of Doug fir on the Island of Elba in Italy, which were part of a post WWII reforestation project, they now dominate the northern flanks Monte Capanne on the western end of the island.
According to Google “Doug fir exhibits considerable morphological plasticity”, which explains its ability to adapt to so many climates. —I saw a small plantation at higher altitudes on the Big Island of Hawaii a few years ago. —Back home the highest concentration is along the west side of the Cascades throughout Washington and Oregon. One of its common names is Oregon pine (I will not go into the lengthy history of its common and scientific names here). There are two inland varieties the Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir (P. menziesii var. glauca), which can be found as far south as central Arizona. —I saw small, contorted ones on the rim of the Grand Canyon.— There is also a Mexican species (P. lindleyana) thought by some to be a variety of P. menziesii. The big-cone Douglas-fir (P. macrocarpa) is another North American species of very limited range in southern California.

There are also two species in eastern Asia P. japonica and P. sinensis (further broken down into three varieties, which are often listed as separate species). None are true firs (genus Abies), the most telling feature being the pendulous cones. All Pseudotsugas have persistent tridentate bracts protruding from the cone scales. The Northwest Coastal Peoples though of these bracts as the back end of a mouse, which was given protection by this generous tree. They used the wood for fire and the making of many implements, but rarely for building. The pitch served as glue, and also a dressing for wounds. Early Hawaiians dug prized canoes from logs that washed up on their shores.

“Though the general habit of the tree is not what gardeners would call weeping,’ writes Donald Culross Peattie in “A Natural History of Western Trees”, “the long pendants have a rather sorrowful grace”. I consider them shaggy. And of the Northwest big trees the least aesthetically graceful. En masse their true beauty is revealed.

A walk among their trunks, here at Evans Creek Preserve east of Redmond, is part of why I love living in this dark corner of the continent. And encountering the giants in the Quinault or Queets valleys on the Olympic Peninsula is the only valid time to use the word “ awesome” in my estimation. They are often listed as the one of the tallest trees in the world along with other west coast conifers.

I hardly think of Doug-firs as Christmas tree. Yet, once they were the most common Christmas tree on the market, and because of this rather shaggy asymmetric habit were sheared into tight cone shapes. As more natural looking trees came into fashion they were replaced in numbers by the noble fir. In 2016 Oregon exported 5.2 million Christmas tree about a third of which were Doug-firs, over half were noble firs, which hold their needles longer and have a very architectural natural growth habit.

As a gardener I would never plant a Doug-fir, yet for years I have gardened under them. They create a harsh environment for plants. I find our native plants, plants often found under them to begin with, are the best plants to grow: Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) and salal (Gaultheria shallon).

I have a small stash of Doug-fir seedlings in my nursery waiting for a day when they are large enough to introduce into the wilder parts of our property. Already two, well over 40-feet tall, are growing in the back with some cedars and Sitka spruce. Farther back, the steep, undevelopable slopes of Tolt Hill are covered with them. They create a ragged fringed horizon line high above us, defining the valley like a wall does a room.
Each year when I start thinking about my yuletide conifer post I try to find some particularly beautiful species to focus on. I have always given Doug-firs the pass-by “for aesthetic reasons”. But since Thanksgiving I have been making them my primary focus, watching the half-grown plantings along freeways, the giants in my clients’ gardens, the seedlings in every nook and cranny.
Slowly this blinding ubiquity has taken on a grace all its own