A&J's Travels: 48 MILES IN 8 HOURS, PART I

Yesterday Jim and I set out for an exploratory road trip up the coast to the north. We had no particular objective except, perhaps, viewing a waterfall. After only a few miles we saw a sign that said, "scenic route, 4 miles." We turned off on it. We had only gone about 1/2 of the 4 miles when we came upon a sign for the Tropical Botanical Gardens, a place we had planned to visit, but hadn't yet looked up on the map.

These gardens were literally carved out of the jungle with a machete. In the 1977 a San Franciscan, Dan Lutkenhouse and his wife Pauline, moved to the Big Island and bought 17 acres of ocean front property and spent the next 6 years getting it cleaned up (old cars, dumped appliances, trash), cleared out (impenetrable tropical jungle) and re-claimed (beautiful Onomea Bay, site of an old settlement). Later they bought an additional 20 acres and then donated all 37 acres as a non-profit nature preserve. We were told that the 1.3 mile trail would take us about 2 hours. It easily took us 4 hours. Here is the first thing we saw right at the entrance to the gardens.

The beginning of the walk into the garden is a 500 foot boardwalk heading downhill 120 feet. Everything was amazing so this part took us quite awhile. For example, here is Jim demonstrating a young bamboo shoot.

The flowers in every direction were stunning.

This one is called "Pink Quill" and is a bromeliad from Ecuador.

This garden has an incredible variety of gingers, of which there are thousands in the world. Here are a couple of my favorites, beehive ginger

and Rose of Siam, which is from Indonesia.

So many of these tropical flowers are really well named. This one was called "Cat's Whiskers" and comes from the Philippines.

And this, "White Bat Plant" from New Guinea and Malaysia.

The founder planted an enormous variety of heliconia, such as this Heliconia Longissima "Red Wings," from Colombia,

which is incredibly long.

Here are some others, quite different:

This one, "Hanging Lobster Claw" is from Peru.

Not only were there hundreds of different blossoms in this garden

but the greenery was also astounding - palms, philodendrons, bamboo, monkey pod tree, plus tons of what we know as house plants, vines of enormous proportions scaling tree trunks.