Munroidendron racemosum (pokalakala)

Today at NTBG nursery I cleaned up a full table of plants -- weeding and organizing everything.
Unless you are very interested in rare tropical plants, gardening, etc. this may be exceedingly boring.

Started before 8am and finished about 3:30pm with a short lunch break. It was a not quite as repetitive as the fern cleanup, and thanks to some cloud cover the hot tropical sun was only full on for a couple of hours. A pair of ultra-light planes cruised overhead at least a couple of times. You can see exactly where I was working over at Google Maps (N 21.898677, W 159.502497).

The table held varieties of Munroidendron racemosum a.k.a. Polyscias racemosa or in Hawaiian pokalakala, an endangered plant that is endemic to Kauai. According to one source known specimens number in the hundreds. These were all young plants, just a few feet tall and none were flowering; grown trees can exceed twenty feet. Good thing I didn't know how rare these were at the time as they were a handful.
Fortunately, I managed not to damage any of them which was actually quite tricky. The plants are well established and tough, but range 2, 3, some 4 feet tall yet many are planted in tiny (3 or 4 inch) containers, so they are extremely "tippy". The plant is a long and slender round trunk with a bunch of thin branches of leaves developing toward the top. For some reason, the trunks tend not to grow straight but at odd twisted wavy bowed shapes which do not balance. Several were leaning against or bound to jury-rigged supporting twine tied between poles extending up from the table which I also repaired and rearranged as best I could. 

To stabilize a tray of plants was challenging. Packing the tray of 3 inch containers with a five-by-five array was a stable base, but the plants were bushy enough that it was a chaotic snarl of branches, and the branches had a way of entangling themselves that was difficult to separate. Fewer plants to the tray was much more workable, but then each plant's base was wobbly and when one would tip the domino effect would cause others to lean or fall over as well. The off-balance branches could be aligned to lean together to the center (getting tangled) or turned to reach out away from the tray (entangling the next tray) -- nothing really seemed to work so I ended up with a little of all these techniques.

Some plants were identified by a numbered metal tag -- a six digit code for the species with a three digit unique number for each specimen. The majority just had plastic tags stuck in the container as are seen in commercial nurseries listing just the six digit number and name. I ordered the plants on the table in numerical order while weeding each pot. Given the unstable plants and support twine traipsing over the table it was quite a process shifting everything around into order.

It's good doing work totally unlike one's "real work" and while this isn't a "fun" job, at the end of the day the value of the effort is certainly clear. Since the roots of these plants are exposed and entangled with the weed roots this was all done by hand: no tools allowed. 

One thing I'm curious about is why so much variation in the weeds -- some containers were solid weeds, others a few, and some had virtually no weeds. Same plants, potting, and other conditions. Actually, many of the weed-infested plants were easy to do -- just pulling out the tops the roots and everything came cleanly out. The really time-consuming ones were where there were many tiny weeds just sprouting, pairs of pinhead-sized leaves covering the exposed earth that had to be nipped out one by one.