By Lois Taylor
Friday, November 22, 1996
Lois Taylor, whose gardening column usually runs in this space, is enjoying the holiday with her family. Her column will return next Friday.
Lois Taylor, whose gardening column usually runs in this space, is enjoying the holiday with her family. Her column will return next Friday.
ByKathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
Dr. Peter S. Green wrote the text and Mary Grierson
created the illustrations for "A Hawaiian Florilegium."
Technically, a florilegium is a collection of botanical drawings, showing leaves, flowers and fruit that are technically accurate.
It takes a rare combination of artistic skill along with a thorough knowledge of botany to carry this off, and Mary Grierson has. She has painted in watercolors 43 of Hawaii's native, endemic and introduced plants for the collection.
Grierson is a retired senior botanical artist and illustrator of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, outside of London.
The book's text is by Dr. Peter S. Green, past director and Keeper of the Herbarium at Kew and formerly a faculty member at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. He thoroughly researched his subject, and his narration includes legends of the early Hawaiians and Polynesian history as well as the more technical botanical classification of each plant.
Grierson and Green were in Honolulu last week for a book signing at Queen Emma's Summer Palace. The book, Grierson explained, has been a 25-year project, a collaboration between herself and the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai. The garden and the University of Hawai'i Press are the publishers.
"It all came about when I was a botanical illustrator at Kew," she said. "It was my job to work for the botanists there. I was quietly working when a very handsome young student asked me if I would please do some drawings for him.
"It was Bill Theobald, who was eventually named director of the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden (before the name of the Kauai garden was changed from Pacific to National.) He was working in the laboratory in the gardens at Kew, on sabbatical from UCLA. He said, 'You ought to go to Hawaii. They have nice things there for you to paint.' Going to Hawaii sounded to me like going to the moon."
After Grierson retired from Kew in 1975, and Theobald had been named director of the PTBG, he invited her to Kauai. She accepted.
" 'I have something I need for you to paint,' he said, and he handed me a breadfruit with its huge leaves. I'd been painting little primroses at Kew and I was rather bowled over," she recalled.
The book, Grierson said, was Theobald's idea from the start. She worked on illustrations at the Kauai garden for three months, then returned to England. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she continued to visit Kauai.
By then, her reputation as one of the world's premier botanical artists was established. But Theo-bald became ill and retired, and Kauai was devastated by two hurricanes. The book was on hold.
Dr. William Klein took over as executive director of NTBG in 1994, and he revived the project. Grierson's works were reassembled and photographed, and Peter Green resumed work on the text.
Klein, in the book's forward, calls the florilegium "a family album of paradise, portraits of ancient voyagers who against all odds made it to the most remote islands on earth."
These are the native plants that reached Hawaii and evolved here long before humans could have introduced them. Some seeds and spores were probably blown on the jet stream from Southeast Asia, others arrived by sea. Beach naupaka, Klein writes, has seeds adapted to flotation in sea water. Others seeds were transported by migrating birds.
There are plants in the book that are unfamiliar to most island residents, partly because they are endangered and rarely seen or because their habitat is remote.
Iliau, for example, is a member of the genus Wilkesia, which contains only one other species and is confined to the leeward mountains of Kauai.
Uhiuhi is now down to 50 existing plants, mostly on the Big Island in dry, uninhabited areas. Green, in his text, explains that its hard wood was shaped into blades by the early Hawaiians to cut off the top part of the taro corm in their highly sophisticated taro farming practices.
It was also used for the runners for sleds in a dangerous sport of the alii. Men of the Hawaiian nobility raced these 16-foot sleds down steep grass-covered slopes, one of which is still visible mauka of Keahou on the Big Island.
The book's final chapter includes many plants - good and bad - that have been introduced here in the last century, from bird of paradise to banana poka.
The book is $45, but is an heirloom in the making. At good antique book stores or at auctions, illustrated pages from similar 17th and 18th century books cost as much as a compact car.
"A Hawaiian Florilegium" is now available at most bookstores, or can be ordered from the University of Hawai'i Press. Call 1-800-956-2840 for information.
