Ever Green
By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Pat Oka kneels in one of the planting beds he designed
at Waimanalo Elementary School.
WHEN he was younger, Pat Oka studied landscape gardening in Japan, and one thing he learned, he knows he will never forget. "My teacher told me, 'We taught you the best way to make a garden, but you can't limit your work to catering to the rich because everyone deserves beautiful garden,' and that's the way I do it," he said. Well-schooled in
garden designOka is now the landscape architect for the state school system, and in charge of maintaining and beautifying its campuses. "I think that beautiful grounds contribute to a child's pride in his school and help to make it a place where he will want to learn," he said. "I want to see kids grow up in a beautiful environment. If they don't grow up with gardens, they won't appreciate art."
Another thing he was taught in Japan is to do it one step at a time and to set up goals. "Landscaping a campus is different from designing a residential garden," he said. "First comes the safety of the children." Looks, in fact, come last, preceded by ease of maintenance because of tight budgets.
The landscaping on each Oahu campus is maintained by three mowing crews. Beyond that, each school custodian devotes 40 minutes a day to landscape maintenance, and volunteers do the rest. "You don't need many volunteers -- we used only six to work at Waimanalo Elementary, and they did a great job." The plants were donated by the Hawaii Association of Nurserymen, of which Oka was president for five years. Friends count, he says.
In designing school planting, Oka said he considers safety first. "That means no Norfolk Island pines, no coconut trees, no sea grape. The mass of the Norfolk pine trunk is so heavy that it will blow over in a storm. Coconut trees have fruit and fronds that fall if you don't spend a lot of money on having them trimmed regularly.
"Washington Intermediate had a 30-foot coconut palm that looked like trouble, and I asked DAGS (Department of Accounting and General Services) to remove it. But before they got around to it, two weeks ago it fell down. Fortunately it was during summer vacation and nobody was around. Koko Head Elementary had a sea grape that blew over, too, this summer." Among his goals is to replace as many coconut palms as possible with the native loulu palm that has fruit the size of marbles.
Oka said that he would find the job overwhelming if it weren't for his background in landscaping. In addition to his degree in landscape architecture, he has been a landscape contractor and for many years ran a nursery at the back of Niu Valley and more recently in Waimanalo.
Oka learned from a volunteer project to improve the landscaping at Weinberg Village for the homeless in Waimanalo that you can't renovate and run. Understandably, the residents had many more pressing problems than bugs in the plumeria, but many of his 120 donated plants have died. "I figured that the homeless were getting shabby treatment, and I had some extra plants, so decided to plant them at the village. A bunch of Marines drove by, stopped and helped me, but a lot of the stuff died from lack of care."
This encouraged him to teach the school children about gardening. "At Waialae School, I put in a flower garden around the flagpole, and I talked to the kids about taking care of it. I showed them how to plant seeds to replace the plants that might die. It gave them a sense of it being their garden at their school and something to be proud of."
When Oka did landscaping for the Yamaha corporation in Japan, he learned a management process that he uses here. "It's called Quality Circle," he said. "I talk first to the principal and say, 'How would you like your school to look?' and then we involve everybody in the process -- the kids, the teachers, the principal and the school board. We listen and we act.
"It's problem solving from the bottom up, and the kids know they are being listened to. We're doing the same thing with the ground crews. One of the guys told me that in the 30 years he worked at the job, it was the first time anybody asked him about a better way to do his job, and then made changes."
With the established campuses, Oka's job is maintenance, but with the new schools being built, he is insisting on a weed-free landscaping. "If you spray and kill the weeds, and spray again to kill the seeds, and do this twice, eventually you will have a lawn that can be kept weed free simply by hand weeding.
Oka added both the federal government and private business offer grants for school landscape improvement, and he is trying to get more schools to apply for these. Most of them require physical help from the parents. "If parent-teacher groups will contact me, I'll help, but they have to promise time and manpower. Ten working bodies can do a whole project. At Kalihi Uka, the alumni did the work." Interested school groups should call Pat Oka at 586-3456.
Gardening Calendar in Do It Electric!
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