By Lois Taylor
Friday, December 13, 1996
Lois Taylor is celebrating the holidays.
Her gardening column, Ever Green, returns to the
Star-Bulletin’s Home Zone next Friday.
Lois Taylor is celebrating the holidays.
Her gardening column, Ever Green, returns to the
Star-Bulletin’s Home Zone next Friday.
The gift shops at Lyon Arboretum and Foster Botanical Garden, and at any garden shop in town have lots to offer as Christmas gifts to gardeners. They aren't crowded, they have adequate parking, the salespeople are knowledgeable and there's a wide range of prices.
For gardeners on the cutting edge, the newest items at Lyon Arboretum gift shop are called "Hawaiian Cultures," and are native and cultural plants of Hawaii from the arboretum's micropropagation facility. According to Gregory Koob who heads the project, the tiny plants were produced by tissue culture, keeping a fragment of the mother plant alive in a test tube.
What you buy for $5 is the sealed test tube with the plant growing in it. Part of the cost is a contribution to support the research work of the Micropropagation Facility that is propagating Hawaii's threatened and endangered plants. None that are for sale are in these categories. Choices include palapalai fern, taro and kookoolau.
The test tube wears a woven lauhala collar that can be used as a napkin ring and stands on a small base. Both the base and the lauhala collar were made by arboretum volunteers.
Instructions come with each test tube, explaining that the tube is not to be opened, but left in a cool, brightly lighted place, but not direct sunlight. It can remain there for several months, and needs no fertilizer or water. Because it is growing, it will eventually use up all the nutrients provided, and the plant will get too big for the tube. At that point, you open the container, pull out the plant, pot it and water it. Koob explains that because it has been living in 100 percent humidity, this condition needs to be duplicated until the plant gains some strength.
All of the instructions are included with the test tube.
But if you want to expand on the gift for a serious gardeners, Koob recommends including a copy of "Plants From Test Tubes: An introduction to Micropropagation" by Lidiane Kytex and John Kleyn. It costs $26.95, and explains how you can do all of this in your own kitchen.
The gift shop also sells a variety of books on gardening, as well as locally made jams, jellies and chutneys, note cards, key chains, hat lei and drink coasters all made by local craftspeople.
Lyon Arboretum is located at 3860 Manoa Road at the end of the valley. For information, call 988-7378.
The strength of the Foster Botanical Garden shop is hats for gardening or any other activity in the full sun. One wide-brimmed hat of flowered cotton folds up into a fan that can be slipped into your pocket when you aren't wearing it. It costs $12.95.
Kahala Crafts produces softly padded visors in Hawaiian prints for $11. An imported item is Le Hat, made in China of woven straw that costs $8.50. Wide brimmed and deep crowned, you get it wet, shape it to your head and then let it dry in the sun - the hat, not your head. For garden party gardeners, there are flattering wide-brimmed sheer straw hats decorated with silk flowers that you'd never wear to weed, but are very becoming. They cost $11.95.
Foster Botanical Garden is located at 50 N. Vineyard Blvd. with parking at the ewa end of the property. For information, call 522-7065.
Garden shops are also an excellent place to find Christmas gifts. Star Garden Shop in Moiliili has brought in some new items for the holidays. The shop's manager Dean Takebayashi recommends the beautiful glazed ceramic pots recently imported from China.
They are the traditional deep green or soft blue, in four sizes. The smallest, about 12 inches in diameter, is $15, and the largest, over 2 feet in diameter is $100. They would become part of the interior design of a lanai or living room.
For a practical gift, there is a new heavy plastic wheelbarrow, Scott's Yardall, that has a 200-pound capacity, but is much lighter than a metal wheelbarrow. It has a brake to hold it on hills, and costs $79.95.
Takebayashi suggests that a good gift for a youngster would be a basket containing a small tub of potting soil, a pot, flower seeds and a trowel, all of which would come in under $15.
Finally, for the gardener who really doesn't want to put much time out there, he recommends Aqua Plants. These are ti or panax or pothos in a self-contained water system. "They are guaranteed to last for six months, and we know they'll last a lot longer," Takebayashi said.
"We've got one in a back office that has no windows, just artificial light, and not a lot of that. It's been there more than six months and it's doing fine."
Garden shops are also the place to buy blooming orchid plants, and while they don't demonstrate a great deal of imagination on the giver's part, they are always a treat to receive. A flowering orchid costs anywhere from $6 to just about whatever you want to pay.
So hit the botanical garden gift shops and the garden shops but recognize the fact that it might be hard to give away what you've bought.
