Kaua'i, Day Eight: Limahuli Gardens

Our next adventure on Kaua'i was to head to the Limahuli Garden. This garden, like the Allerton Gardens, is a part of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. It's located after mile marker 9 on Highway 560, the road that hugs the coast leading out from Princeville. The Limahuli Garden is located in the beautiful Limahuli Valley which used to be home to many native Hawaiians. The garden is now a focal point for preserving Kaua'i and Hawai'i's native plants.

As such, it is not really what you think of when you think of a traditional botanic garden. The focus here is not really about providing you with a stunning year round display of flowering plants, but instead to preserve and educate about the native plants of the islands. Most of these plants are not showy flowering plants, instead tending towards mostly being leafy green foliage. The garden also points out invasive species. Both of these kinds of displays are focused around educating people about the ecology and botanical diversity of the island and how to preserve it. While the garden displays are quite beautiful and the views are stunning, it has a diffierent kind of feeling than you might expect.

I did take a lot of pictures, but after taking a tour of the website for the garden, I discovered that they have a virtual version of the same self-guided tour that we took. That tour includes pictures -- good pictures. Instead of trying to repeat the excellent job that they have already done, I thought I would just provide the link to the virtual tour and encourage you all to take virtual trip through their gardens. It's not the same as physically walking the garden, but the text is exactly the same as what we received for the self-guided tour.

Of course, I do have a few pictures of my own -- these are mostly just the pictures that made me happy as we wandered through the garden and hopefully add to the flavor of the garden that you get by going through the virtual tour.. You can click here to go to the starting point in my Kaua'i gallery for the garden walk.

You might have taken note of the fact that many of my pictures have grey and overcast skies. From this, you might get the impression that Kauai is always grey and overcast. This really isn't the case. While we have been here, it has almost uniformly been beautiful and sunny in the morning moving towards cloudiness with patchy sunshine in the afternoon. John and I just don't tend to get out very early, so most of our pictures have that cloudy afternoon thing going. I think this is just part of how the Hawaiian winter shows itself on Kauai (yes, October is considered to be the start of winter here) and goes hand in hand with the beatiful heavy surf that brings the surf boards to the beaches in droves. It is still between 70 and 80 degrees and the sights are still lovely. And given the current weather in Chicago (snow, already!) it's hard to complain about a few grey skies. After all, waterfalls and lush plants both require a goodly amount of rain.

Most of there rest of our afternoon was spent at Ha'ena Beach and Ke'e Beach (the beach at the end of Highway 560 which I previously posted sunset shots from). While we had a late afternoon snack on Ha'ena Beach, I took this short movie of one of those waves that was drawing surfers out of the woodwork all around us.

No new pictures from Ke'e, unfortunately. Once again we went there to snorkel, and the camera stayed safely locked in the car.