sun shining morning
light breeze lau olapa sway
still a bit chilly
What are you? Me??? First thing that comes to mind: a Naturalist. Of course there are other things that I am, but Naturalist, I think, is at the fore. Iʻve always been curious, and Iʻve spent a lot of time wandering and wondering outside. Ma: You kids: Go outside play!
(and wash your feet before you come in the house!). In the good old days, it was playing in the yard, going down to Grampa and Grammaʻs house, exploring all the trails and paths in their jam-packed kinda spooky garden, finding geckos and "Look Gramma..." knowing sheʻd scream hysterically while we ran away. Going to The Gulch to check the steer, maybe taking it a ti leaf treat...
Those of you who fashion lei lāʻī, those twisted or braided (two methods of "hilo") adornments, know that your hands get sticky. Plant sugars. TryTaste next time. Pipi LOVE it...good way to make friends with them.
All that outside time allowed many of us to hone our observational skills. I believe that there are more naturalists than not out there. Especially those of us of a certain age (i.e. olʻ futs), all of us pre-electronica gadgeteria, who found ways to productively occupy our time with little direction from elders after being shown how. Go play outside. Go pull weeds, go pick [beans, Chinese peas, carrots, Mānoa lettuce, peanuts], go water (anʻ no get wet!), go pick oranges (or tangerines)...
Howʻs THIS for a tangerine tree? Hilo and environs seem to have an inordinate number of extremely fruitful (in a good year) tangerine trees. Our version of mangoes on Oʻahu...
on the side of the road in Mountain View...one hopes that theyʻre juicy and sweet. But that seems to depend on the year: the weathers; the rain, the sun, the hot, the cold... And keep the skin. Dry em. Save in the freezer. Then put some in oxtail soup, jook, etc., for that "Hmmm whatʻs this taste? Ono!
Um...Where were we??? Oh. Naturalists... All we were doing was Being Outside and Paying Attention. No charge, No registration, all Free.
And so it is with my friend Lisa on Maui. An amazing and humble woman. Her mom and I became fast friends after meeting in Bea Kraussʻs ethnobotany class at UH Mānoa in ʻ71 or ʻ72 I think. Bea was amazing. She died at 94 in 1998. When she taught us she had been "retired" for several years. First day of class" "Put away your pens and notebooks"...She wanted us to listen to her. To hear her. To pay attention without the distraction of note taking. At the end of class sheʻd hand out a typed and mimeographed sheet (remember the purple ink?) of pertinent info for the plant-of-the-day. Those sheets eventually became the basis for her book:
And hereʻs a clip of Bea from ʻuluʻulu an extremely valuable archive of moving images:
Bea Krauss and ʻawa .
Memories...sometimes Iʻm asked: How do you know all this stuff??? And I reply: Iʻve had great teachers and mentors who each, in their own ways, sated my curiosities of the moment, and inspired others.
Sooooo... Lisa! Back to Lisa. Her curiosities are expansive like mine and her motherʻs. But Lisaʻs are focused on kapa and waihoʻoluʻu. Barkcloth and dyes. Iʻve shared about maʻo hau hele, our endemic yellow hibiscus State Flower [March 28, 2020 blog]. And Lisa recently shared
And please donʻt confuse maʻo hau hele with maʻo (Gossypium tomentosum), our endemic cotton. Ours canʻt be used to make cotton fabric - the fibers are way too short - but it is used to make dye. And maʻo apparently never grew naturally on the Island of Hawaiʻi, as it did/does on other islands, though now itʻs cultivated here, as below in South Kohala.
Below, a Lisa experiment Iʻm particularly excited about. Growing on the lavalands of Kona ʻAkau is a small tree with THE most spectacular endemic flowers. Ever. The critically endangered (a small handful, if that, left in The Wild) Kokiʻo (Kokia drynarioides). I first met this tree in the late 70s while traipsing about the lavalands with HK and Tōb. Well...more stumbling through dense chest-high fountaingrass growing on ʻaʻā, rather than traipsing...
Its pua are mindbogglingly beautiful. The two photos immediately below are mine, the two that follow, Lisaʻs, from legally cultivated plants.
The next two show dye extraction processes. Fascinating to me, because weʻve known that in the past, kokiʻo bark was harvested from trees in Kona ʻAkau so dye could be made to color and preserve fish nets. We never dared experiment because of the rarity of the species. A tree Lisa had purchased, planted, and was mature, recently broke, and so she was able to make dye.
The process worked. The much much more common kukui bark is also used to dye nets, and dye made from it and from kokiʻo have very similar colors. If you try with kukui, be careful! Only gather a little bit bark from each tree, ONLY by making parallel longitudinal cuts (up and down) to allow you to pry the bark off, after making sure that one one else did the same thing recently. Wounds take time to heal. NEVER cut a circle around the trunk. Doing so severs vascular bundles, the nutrient transport system for the tree, thus girdling and killing it. NOT a good conservation practice.
More from Lisa. First, tiare...
Nānū, on the other hand, has spherical unribbed pods. And as said previously, stubbier flowers with the scent of "regular" gardenias: David Eickhoff on Flickr:
Waihoʻoluʻu made from both tiare and nānū pods yield a bright yellow. Below is nānū, again on kapa. Note that the color is yellower than that of Polynesian introduction ʻōlena (turmeric or Curcuma domestica, a cultivated ginger). ʻŌlena produces a dye with golden overtones.
So. Go outside, be niele, and experiment. Iʻm headed out for a stroll in the sun. And while youʻre out and about, observing the Six Feet Apart rule, pay attention. And TryWrite haiku about what you see, feel, taste, hear, and/or touch. Lines of 5/7/5 syllables. GoodFun. Send em to me...no shame...
As always, with aloha,
BobbyC
maniniowali@gmail.com
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