Botanical gardens used to intimidate me; they were full of carefully collected plants with lots of labels listing more things than I thought or sought to keep track of. But I went along, because my wife always enjoyed them and since she was always willing to follow my odd whims, I wanted to follow hers.
And I began to enjoy them, not a student, and unembarrassed by my inability to remember most plants from one trip to the next, but just as places of assembled beauty, something more than the sum of all the species. And sometimes places of odd joy, watching children run and point and ask.
All the ones we visited in the U.S. and Europe had many familiar-seeming species, many native to the area, or at least to the general climate, but each also had some collection of ‘exotic’ plants, meaning species from places much hotter or much colder than where we were. That’s how I learned to think of them: Exotic.
So, it was a bit of a surprise for me to realize, a few years ago, when we visited the Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu and then again recently as I went through my photographs, that from the other side of the lens, the ‘exotic’ was the norm, and the marigolds and tulips and fir trees were the imports.
We visited the garden for what we imagined would be a pleasant morning before the August weather got too hot. We ended up staying most of the day, wandering along pathways, looking off to hills that are actually far outside the garden’s two hundred acres, but make the space look huge.
I haven’t been back since that trip over ten years ago, but the Lyon Arboretum is right at the top of my bucket list for any future trip; Waikiki is just as expected, Pearl Harbor is once, the souvenir shops are forever, but the garden and the Plantation Village/Cultural Center are for again.
The Arboretum has an interesting history. it was founded in 1918 by the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association, not as an arboretum or garden, but as a test site to show practical ways of watershed restoration and reforestation, and to research tree species suitable for the task.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Shakespeare told us, but this is no rose and the smell was far from sweet.
Harold Lyon, a plant pathologist, was the original director, and was responsible for planting about 2,000 species of trees on the land. In 1953, he convinced the HSPA to turn the property over to the University of Hawaii as a research facility, with the stipulation that it would always be used as an arboretum and garden. After his death four years later it was named for him.
Today, there are nearly 15,000 species in the garden, with a strong emphasis on native and Polynesian plants—they never promised you a rose garden!
The Lyon Arboretum is open 8-4 weekdays and 9-3 on Saturdays. Closed Sundays and holidays. From central Honolulu it’s a 25-minute drive that’s only about five miles, but on small streets and roads. It’s also reachable by bus, but with a 23-minute walk from the end of the line according to Google Maps.
