Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden

Last week Kona Gold visited Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in South Kona, and assisted them in landscaping their new visitor center. Run by Peter Van Dyke, Amy Greenwell Garden, or AGG, is a hub for all things native. Their focus on ethnobotany, the study of plants and their relationship with local peoples, has attracted a diverse group of top notch professionals and students to their garden. As the garden staff and a host of volunteers work to preserve extremely rare native species, many of which are endangered or even extinct in the wild, other culturally attuned individuals visit the garden for other reasons. In the short week that Kona Gold spent at AGG, they were joined by a group of College Grad students from some of the most prestigious universities in the nation, an artist who spent his time carving poi boards and a former HYCC member who came back to help out.

Kona Gold was also extremely fortunate to receive a personal tour of the gardens from author and former staff member Noah Lincoln. When Kona Gold first met Noah, they never would have guessed from his warm demeanor and accessible personality that he was one of the foremost experts in ethnobotany, and the author of a book cataloging the garden's numerous plants and their uses. Noah's expertise in the area became clear during the tour, when he gave fascinating accounts of the uses and histories of all the native and Polynesian introduced plants in the garden. Noah's tour made the garden come to life, his insights on the value and rarity of the plants gave the team an idea of what they were working to protect.

However, Kona Gold spent most of their field work time at AGG's brand new visitor's center. While AGG currently resides in an old house up a residential street, the central location of the new visitors' center, next door to Greenwell Park and across the street from the historic Manago Hotel, will make it much more visible and accessible. However, the center had not yet been landscaped, and the slopes bordering the construction area were little more than dirt and weeds, with a few native plants speckled in between. To start, Kona Gold picked, weedwacked, dug and pulled their way through the heaps of invasive and unappealing grasses and weeds the covered the hillside. They then laid out weed mats and irrigation lines to prep the area for native plants. They then planted a lawn of new grass on the hillside, planting bucket after bucket of "centipede grass," a fast-growing grass that makes great lawns.

Then Kona Gold got to work peppering the hillside with young native plants. Along the way they had to contend with fire ants, keep the weed mat clean, and remove large, ungainly rocks from the holes where the plants were to be planted. Kona Gold persevered, however, and soon the hillside was covered with native plants like A'Ali'i, Ma'o Haohele and Aveoveo. During planting, the team also extensively weeded the area, using picks to hack out the invasive and surprisingly resilient ghinny grass. When they were done, the hillside was transformed from a bare construction site to an organized collection of native plants.