Honolulu's Foster Botanical Gardens

The orchids of Foster Botanical Gardens are kept in two major locations.  Here's a photo of the inside area featuring the hybrids.

In a state renowned for its flora frenzy, Foster Botanical Gardens well exploits its age and position.  It's the oldest botanical garden in the state and has had a hundred years to mature its trees.  And it's right in busy Honolulu near the harbor and Chinatown on the biggest road in the state (which once cut it in half).  This makes it the granddaddy of the five gardens that together comprise the Honolulu Botanical Garden system, a total of 650 acres spread over four disparate ecological areas that in total comprise the oldest and largest tropical collection in the U.S.

At 13.5 acres, Foster is only about 2% of the total size of that garden system.  But this place makes up for its diminished size with quality, especially in trees and hybrid orchids.  Here's two of those trees below:

The Royal Caribbean Palm from Barbados:  We get our hearts of palm from its central leaves	Not your father's fichus: the Chinese Banyan from Tropical Asia sends out hanging roots from its branches that eventually merge with the rest of the trunk.

The trees here are big because they are old.  This land became a garden in 1851 when a Prussian physician and amateur botanist named William Hillebrand began convincing sea captains to bring him plantings from around the world.  He grounded these in the 4.6 acres of what the Garden now calls the upper terrace.  In addition, as the Queen's royal physician, Hillebrand was sent throughout Asia to find new labor sources for the sugar cane industry and to try to find a cure for leprosy, a disease then threatening the islands.  While on these trips, Hillebrand sent back plants and animals he thought useful to Hawaii. 

Here's another interesting tree which blossoms only once (but quite spectacularly) in its lifetime: the Talipot Palm from India.  (PC users, push the F11 key to see the full picture).  While not in bloom on our visit, this 37-year-old tree's one-time flowering will produce the largest bouquet in the plant world, holding millions of buds on the lighter green stalk seen here protruding from its top.  Many of these flowers will go on to become small fruit with a single seed, taking a year to mature.  Historically, the leaves were used instead of paper in parts of Asia producing long-lasting palm-leaf manuscripts. Once fruiting is done, so is the Talipot Palm and it dies. Here's an unexpected sign for a garden: Which leads us to another interesting tree:  the Cannonball tree from the Brazil Nut family.  While native to Guiana, it's grown in temples in India because its flower resembles a snake sacred to Shiva.

See if you can catch the resemblance in the picture below:

While the flower is pretty, the fruit makes the tree more interesting (and gives it its name).  Here's a couple photos of two nearby trees in the garden.  The one at left shows the vine-like stems from the main trunk that hold the fruit:

The fruit is about 6-9 inches in diameter containing hundreds of seeds but its flesh has a smell humans don't care for.  (On the other hand, the flowers are quite fragrant).

Trees are a big deal at the Foster Gardens since the place has had over 150 years to grow them.  In 1975, the Hawaiian legislature passed an act defining (and protecting) "exceptional trees."  Of the 100 trees so designated in O'ahu, 25 are in this 14-acre garden.

The garden was named after Dr. Hillebrand's neighbors, the Nova Scotian Thomas Foster (a shipbuilder) and his partially native Hawaiian wife Mary who purchased Hillebrand's property after he moved back to his native Germany.  From a five story tower he had built along with a mansion, Thomas could watch the ships he'd built enter Honolulu harbor while Mary enjoyed and improved the garden including adding an irrigation system.  At her death, she bequeathed the gardens to the city.  This was 1930 and the depression had impoverished city government making it unlikely that they would be able to keep the property up.  Fortunately the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association (which had an experimental nursery on-site to develop cures for sugar cane diseases) was able to maintain it under the direction of the nursery head, Minnesotan Harold L. Lyon.

Dr. Lyon was a key figure in the evolution of the garden from the Foster personal grounds to the keystone of the Oahu Botanical Gardens.  During his 27-year tenure as director, his special passion (and a great crowd pleaser) were the orchids. In all, he introduced over 10,000 new plants to the islands.

Orchids are found in two major areas.  The first of these sits next to the busiest road in Hawaii, the Interstate H1. Here's a few photos from this outside area which features orchids from old and new world growing on rocks and trees:

	While the wild orchids are displayed here, a greenhouse area on the lower terrace sports a hybrid garden where the photo at the top of this page was taken.  (We have several more hybrid orchid photos in the auxiliary set of pictures).

But besides orchids and trees, there's lots more to see here, even in January.  One winter bloomer here is the lehua-haole shrubs (both white and red).  Check out the bee-but in the left picture and the red lehua-haole blossoms at right.  This is a slow-growing shrub (but preferable to a slow-growing bush, ask any democrat).

The lehua haole comes from Brazil and its name means foreign lehua in Hawaiian as it resembles the native 'ohi'a lehua tree.  The powder-puff is the stamen, shaped differently, you've noticed, from its human equivalent.  An old Hawaiian myth suggests that to pick these flowers will create rain.[105] Nearby branches also contains tiny clusters of fruit that look like large strawberries but are peas.  (The shrub belongs to the pea family.  We'll show you some of that fruit in the auxiliary set of photos.

Check out many of the other trees, bushes, and flowers of Foster Garden by clicking here.

For an index of all of our Hawaii pictures, click here

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