Kaua'i, Day Three: The Allerton Gardens

The Hawaiian Islands are a remarkable place to grow all sorts of plants. In fact, because of the climate, it essentially is a greenhouse without the glass windows. Orchids can grow "in the wild" on trees with no additional maintenance. Flowering plants from all over the world are in great abundance. In fact, this raises something of a problem, because it is very easy to introduce non-native species whose vigorous behavior can overwhelm the native plants. The same is true of animals as well. Many of Kaua'i's animals (and this is also true of the other Hawaiian Islands) did not develop in a predator-filled environment, and thus, don't have the ability to protect themselves from introduced species.

It's one of the cool things that happens from having a blog, but my trip from Kauai inspired an email from Pauline, who is part of the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project where she is specifically working on helping to preserve the Puaiohi -- a bird with only 200-600 individuals left in the wild.

She wrote the following in her email to me, and I thought I would share it:

if you ever give any money towards conservation of biodiversity in the U.S., please consider supporting Hawaii (the nature conservancy does great stuff, and they're not my employer). Hawaii has something like 2/3 of the endangered species in the U.S., but gets very little money and has low visibility. The bird which I mostly focus on, the Puaiohi, has only 200-600 individuals left, but gets less than $200k in funding per year - compare that to gray wolves or whooping cranes or anything on the mainland U.S.

Even if you never contribute any money to this kind of cause (and I am not soliciting donations here) I think it's important to know about the ecological problems that face the US and other countries. While I knew Hawaii was a fragile place, I never realized how fragile some species are. It's a good reminder to treat every place you go with as much respect as possible and to do your part to take good care of the wild places that might be home to some animal that desperately needs that place to stay wild to survive.

It's probably the ultimate irony that I would talk about native species conservation in the same post as when I talk about our trip to the Allerton Gardens, which are part of the the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. It is a truly spectacular garden, but almost all of the plants are imports from other tropical locations. It was a space the transformation of which started with Queen Emma and progressed with the Allerton family (the Allertons founded the First National Bank of Chicago). So today's new gallery entries are from our guided tour of the Allerton Garden. Flowers a plenty ahead! (Apologies in advance for not remembering most of their common or scientific names... I didn't have a notepad with me to write things down with). And if you want to start at the beginning, you can enter the gallery here.

Overlooking Allerton Garden