California ain't so bad; it could be worse
Carl Bell
Regional advisor – Invasive Plants
I'm feeling guilty because my last blog post was a month ago. But I have an excuse; my wife and I spent the last two weeks on Kauai, HI on vacation. Kauai is the Garden Isle, a lush tropical paradise filled with exotic plants. Well, exotic is the right word, everywhere you turned you saw invasive grasses, shrubs, vines, and trees, not to mention the jungle fowl (what they euphemistically call feral chickens), non-native doves, cardinals, finches, sparrows, geckos, and on and on. The pink flower at the right is banana poke (Passiflora tripartita) crawling over a native fuchsia (Fuchsia magellanica)
I know we are often dismayed by the challenge to restore native vegetation here in SoCal, but I think Kauai is far more difficult and discouraging. Not hopeless, it's never hopeless, but really difficult.
One day we went up Waimea Canyon to Kokee State Park, which is about 3600' elevation. We took a short walk down a dirt road to look at plants (my wife is a horticulturalist, at least as addicted to checking out plants as I am). In a swampy area next to the road we saw Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii), banana poke (Passiflora tripartita), lots of non-native grasses, Kahili ginger (Hedychium gardnerianum), Angel trumpet (Brugmansia sp.), Impatiens (Impatiens sp.) and the one that took me by surprise – Mexican elderberry (Sambuscus mexicana); what the heck is our elderberry doing on a mountain in Hawaii?. The area on our drive up the road to the park was dominated by silk oak (Grevillia robusta), mango (Mangifera indica) and exotic legume trees; Mollucan Albizia (Falcataria molluccana), several acacias and albizias. There were a few natives, but they were clearly a minority population, like the Hawaiian people.
It's still beautiful, and the beaches are great. Bodysurfing in 750 water is a treat compared to the frigid SoCal icewater. But now I'm back and will try to be more productive.
By the way, thanks for reading. The blog is averaging about 75 hits a day, not a huge number but very gratifying for me. Aloha.
