Ever Green
By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
Working on the traditional dry masonry rock wall are, from left,
Mahina Pukahi, Orlen Gould and Gaylord Gampong.
TOM Sawyer thought of it first, when he inveigled his friends to paint his aunt's fence by convincing them it was fun. Thus he avoided the tedious chore of doing it alone, and got the fence painted faster. Rock-solid tradition shared
Lyon Arboretum followed Tom's lead over last weekend, and enlisted 20 people to build a dry masonry rock wall at the entrance to the Beatrice H. Krauss Ethnobotanical Garden. What's more, they paid $50 each for the privilege, and enjoyed every minute of it. They also learned the technique, in order to build their own walls.
The wall was built in the ancient Hawaiian tradition used by the early settlers for their taro terraces, heiau and house foundations. The stones are quarried, split and stacked into a wall without the use of mortar. The weight of each rock as it stacked upon another creates a force that holds the wall together. Some of these old walls are still standing on the neighbor islands.
To demonstrate how a wall is built and to lead the construction, Lyon Arboretum brought Richard Kanahele and his cousins Howard Kanahele and Gaylord Gampong from Kauai. The men are on the staff of the National Tropical Botanical Garden at Lawai, but their roots are on Niihau. Their grandfather Daniel Kanahele taught them the technique of dry rock wall construction, but he was better known as the hero of the Battle of Niihau. After the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, an armed Japanese pilot landed on the island and led an attempt to take it over. Kanahele, one of a group of islanders taken captive, was shot by the pilot. Angered, he dashed the pilot's head against a stone wall, killing him.
The moss rocks used for the arboretum wall were bought from a company in Waianae and delivered to the site, but the Kanahele family on Niihau quarried their own. "My grandfather would dig up big rocks and then light a fire. He'd get the rock really hot and then he'd crack it with a sledgehammer," Richard Kanahele said.
This often ensured a flat face to one side of the rock where it was cleaved, which is important in laying the wall. The ends of the wall, and the corner if it forms an angle, should be finished with flat stones for aesthetic reasons important to the early builders. The rock is formed by cooling lava, and is porous where gas bubbles formed when the lava was hot. The wall, therefore, has excellent drainage.
While the Kanahele cousins were responsible for the construction, landscape architect Janet Gillmar drew up the plan for the wall and its location fronting the ethnobotanical garden. "There was an old plywood sign standing on the ground giving the name of the garden, and I mentioned that a more permanent bronze sign would be more appropriate," Gillmar said. "Then the rock wall was suggested. Bea would love it."
Beatrice Krauss remained a research affiliate at the arboretum and in the botany department at the University of Hawaii until her death last year at the age of 94. She taught classes, lectured to school children and was recognized world-wide as an authority on the pre-contact uses of native Hawaiian plants. She was, as Gillmar said, "a wonder." The garden named for her contains many of the native plants about which she wrote.
The students of dry rock wall building learned one thing fast. It wasn't like Tom Sawyer's friends painting his fence. Fence painting isn't very complicated. Dry stone wall building is. In all likelihood, they would never be able to build their own, themselves. However, as the Kanaheles told them, they would be able to supervise the construction by a crew strong enough to lift 100-pound rocks and heave them onto the rising wall. It works best using five people.
The trick, Gillmar told them, as with most things, is a good foundation. A trench 1 foot deep, 3 feet wide and about 25 feet long had been dug for the wall, which would be 3 feet above ground level. "Big rocks are laid in the trench," Richard Kanahele said. "Save the ones with a linear quality, long and narrow, to lock in the face of the wall." Two people worked on each side of the wall, lifting and wedging in the big stones, and another worker followed, filling in the middle space. They spelled each other, and some of the class simply stood and watched.
The wall slopes inward, so that while it is 3 feet wide at its base, it is only about a foot wide at the top. During the doughnut break at about 11 a.m., there was satisfaction among the builders. There was solid feeling of respect and admiration for the Kanahele cousins with their gentle instruction, strength and total knowledge of what they were doing. But the consensus seemed to be that very few of the class members would try the technique on their own. "Maybe it's like doing a hula," one of the women said. "You have to grow up knowing how."
Gardening Calendar in Do It Electric!
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