Tropical Gardening 101

The Allerton Garden parking lot (not public)

Having done a good number of hours helping the garden staff with the upkeep of the Allerton and McBryde gardens, I think I have a small degree of competency and have learned a lot that I wanted to put down here. This will likely only be of any interest to gardeners and may be very elementary for serious gardeners.

The photo to the right is the parking lot. When volunteering in the garden one gets to drive down via the service entrance from the mauka side above the valley - this is a completely different facility from the visitor's center in Poipu by the Spouting Horn for tours. (I learned the difference my first day showing up at the wrong place then driving several miles around to the right office.) This arrangement keeps the workers activities out of the way of the tours, important because both approach roads are mostly single lane. Driving "to work" each day is quick mini-tour of the gardens and a treat to begin and end the work day.

The first rule I learned would be not to try and do it all. Work is focused on a specific area and to do specific tasks only. We do pick up the odd branch or something that fell into a path but only if it is quick or a major problem. At first I would try to do extra things "while I was there" and of course this derailed me from the task at hand. This place is so big and the staff is only a few people so everyday is spent doing the next thing that can't wait.

Imagining the work I would do I envisioned myself nurturing the plant collection here, but in fact the work is completely different. Mostly I kill plants: weeding. Or cut back overzealous plants: sometimes even native plants can become nuisances in the wrong part of the garden. Then we spend a lot of time raking up, picking up, pulling down, hauling and loading all the junk we extract into the compost heap. There are a couple of places they dump the detritus, one in a very scenic location overlooking the garden on the west side at the end of a former cane field rail line that winds uphill and through two tunnels: it could be a Disneyland ride except for the enormous pile of garden waste at the end of the ride.

Weeding reminds me of the other important work rule I have discovered: be sure you are weeding weeds. After a day of experience I was about to pull out a scraggly random weed (breaking the aforementioned rule by doing extra stuff in my idle time) when I asked the gardener, just in case. Turns out that "weed" was an endangered native plant that you could count the number left alive on your fingers. Fortunately I asked before yanking it out. It should have been tagged but wasn't.

Here's a recent example of a form of weeding: rescuing trees from vine crawlers. Philodendrons in this case  were encroaching on all the trees in this area along the ditch running between the Thanksgiving Room and up above the Diana Room. On the left you can see in the darker "V" shaped tree on the left leaves a few feet up the tree, or all around the base of the tree in front. On the right you can see all that is pruned back; what you don't see is the buckets of plant material cut and hauled away, two loads worth.

Before

After