Waking Up in Eden (6 page)

As I confided my quandary over whether to renovate the cottage, Faye suddenly turned, recognition on his face, “When I was growing up, my family had a ranch in the Lawai Valley,
where I would go on weekends to fool around with horses. Now, where is this house?”

“On Lauoho Road. You know, around the corner from the banana plantation and up the hill through a bamboo tunnel?”

“Yeah, I know it. On Halloween, my friends and I went trick or treating on horseback around there, so we knew all the houses. But we never went up to that one. There was something about it, so removed from everything else, that was kind of spooky.”
Great,
I thought,
I've got the neighborhood haunted house.

I wanted nothing to do with renovations. I knew all about the dust, the upset, the workmen traipsing through the house early in the morning or not showing up for weeks until I wanted to strangle them. The projects that didn't turn out quite right and made my blood boil every time I looked at them. Never again. And yet I remembered that wondrous privacy of five acres. I asked him, “So? Do you think I should do it?”

He just pressed his lips into a straight line. Slowly he nodded his head.

U
UUU-GHHA, UUUUU-GGHAAA
,
the horn blared like a submarine's dive signal as a cartoonish vehicle bore down on us with threatening speed. Dr. Klein drove the fanciest of the Garden's three antique touring cars, a restored, silver-gray 1947 Dodge land sampan once used as a public taxi on the Big Island. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption had a long snout festooned with acres of shiny chrome. A surrey-style roof provided shade for open-air seating. None of us at the Garden entirely trusted Dr. Klein behind the wheel, as he usually got so involved delivering the botanical lecture of the day that he paid scant attention to the road. He screeched to a stop where I waited with half a dozen prospective donors invited to a late Sunday afternoon barbecue. Few could resist a private, after-hours invitation to Allerton Garden. I ushered the guests up onto rear leather benches. We jostled against one another as the sampan careened out of the parking lot, seemingly on two wheels.

At the end of the public road, two massive brick King Kong gates barred our way. Dr. Klein cheerfully refused all offers of help, hopped down to unlock the gate, drove through, then hopped back down again to lock it behind us. We followed a red dirt road through two more locked gates, along the edge
of a field of tall sugarcane. Then we entered a lane enclosed by hedges of thorny night-blooming cereus vine that blocked any view.

With a dramatic flourish, Dr. Klein drew to a stop before an opening in the dense foliage. A steep cliff fell away before us, revealing a hidden cove of blue waters veiled by bending palms and the chartreuse lawn of the Allerton estate. Bathed in late afternoon sunshine, there stretched before us a strange other world, isolated and enclosed by jagged lava cliffs surrounding the valley. Two of the guests gasped, as people always did at their first sight of Lawai-Kai. It was an iconic vision of a rich man's paradisiacal hideaway — calm, inviolate, alluring in its secretiveness.

Subdued by the breathtaking beauty, we were quiet for the rest of the descent, veering away from the ocean into the forest. We passed through a narrow rock canyon where air roots from a giant banyan tree above brushed our roof, then through a plumeria grove that wrapped us in its musky scent. On the valley floor, Dr. Klein parked the sampan at Pump Six, a red barnlike building that once housed irrigation pumps for the old sugar plantation that had filled the valley before the botanical garden was established. We'd ferry the picnic supplies to the beach in electric golf carts.

Dr. Klein opted to walk, leading what I privately called “the Big Donor Tour.” Tonight's guests included a wealthy couple targeted for the Garden's $1,000-per-year Fellows Society; a couple of local businessmen; a visiting scientist. Not really A-list, but Dr. Klein gave them the mil lion-dollar treatment: his lecture on the history of gardens; his views of landscape design; his plans for turning NTBG into not only a tourist attraction
but a preeminent center for botanical research. To fuel his ever-expanding enterprises, Dr. Klein adopted the P. T. Barnum approach to fund-raising. The moneyed were no different than others, he theorized, and what they really missed was passion and the chance to do something important. He was selling dreams.

For the staff, long neglected and ignored, Bill became their uber-mentor, encouraging them to reach for new aspirations. He invited them to dinner, sponsored study trips to mainland gardens to broaden their outlooks, and advised further education for some. “Gardens are for growing people” was a Klein motto. While much of the Garden staff worshipped him as the long-sought savior who could shake up the place and turn it into a showplace, others resisted his plans for change. “You're turning it into a Disneyland,” accused one of the intransigents in a meeting. “Visitors will tramp over the plants and ruin our scientific collections,” they complained. In a rare fit of temper, Dr. Klein had turned an apoplectic red to address them, “This is our future, folks. We need to bring in people or the Garden will die.”

He seemed to befriend any and all, promiscuously. A visiting scientist, author, or other personage with even the shakiest of credentials could wangle a free tour and lengthy discussion with him. I protested after one late Friday night when he pressed me and several other staff members into entertaining a couple of bozos from L.A. — filmmakers, they claimed. But he was unrepentant. “Make friends, because come a hurricane, you're going to need them,” he insisted.

Our group trailed behind him as we walked into the tropical fruit orchard planted by the garden's creators, Robert and John
Allerton, soon after they arrived from Illinois in 1938. Gnarled orange and lem on trees grew in profusion, but also cherry trees. Cannonball-sized pomelos resembling thick-skinned grape fruit littered the ground. Dr. Klein reached up and plucked a waxy yellow star fruit, took out his penknife, and cut samples for the group. Munching the crisp applelike slices, the guests were literally eating out of his hand.

We meandered down a cinder-covered pathway, past a castiron shell urn that marked the entrance to Allerton Garden. The light changed, the temperature dropped, and a green gloom enmeshed us in a sense of lost antiquity. High Java plum trees soared above, dwarfing our mere human forms. No mat ter how many times I came here, I was never quite prepared for its arching vastness. As we strolled, we passed the Thanksgiving Room, the first of what the Allertons called their “garden rooms.” An opening in the far leaf wall revealed the white latticework of a whimsical gazebo and another, more secret, garden beyond. The story was that Robert and John Allerton had invited guests to a casual picnic on Thanksgiving Day, then ushered them here for a surprise formal banquet.

The two Allertons, almost Victorian in formality, were the best of hosts. They famously induced guests to choose from their extensive costume collection of silk Chinese robes and skullcaps, gold-threaded saris from India, Japanese kimonos, or the Bali dancer's spired headdress that made the Allertons giggle when the women unknowingly chose it, a prostitute's gilded finery. Looking into the shadowy, green-walled room, I imagined long tables garbed in white linens, silver candelabra, and dark-skinned butlers serving from lavish trays. I could almost
see specters of costumed guests, glasses in hand, gliding among the tables, laughing.

I discerned a hint of camp at Allerton, a humor that stops just at the edge of bad taste. The Victorians built garden follies — fake Gothic castle ruins, grottoes, and forest huts — to create an atmosphere of a lost world. Allerton Garden is a Victorian folly, but with a wink. Coy cupids and naked stone gods spy on visitors along the garden walks.

The Allertons were gay, although the Garden's official histories never acknowledge that fact. Garden tour guides don't even use the code phrase “long-time companions.” I thought the subterfuge silly and arcane. But it was a different world when the Allertons arrived on Kauai, bought the property, and spent their last decades carving this wonderland out of the jungle. Robert, the wealthy heir to one of Chicago's stockyard fortunes, had entered middle age when he met John Gregg, a twenty-two-year-old orphan. Employing a protective camouflage, they posed as father and foster son. Their Hawaiian garden became their refuge and hideout. So the NTBG still calls them father and son, the elaborate masks they selected.

Nothing else in Hawaii even begins to match Allerton Garden, with its amphitheater-like valley into which the two gentlemen poured gleanings from their travels of the world — sculpture from Italy, China, and Thailand, and plants from tropical zones everywhere.

When Robert died in 1964, his obituary noted that few on Kauai really knew him. Yet for years the locals whispered stories about these two odd gentlemen. Cane workers spotted them from the cliffs above and reported that the Allertons wandered
around naked. They threw parties, sometimes for men only, and they dressed up. I may have been plunked into paradise, but I couldn't suppress the reporter in me. I sorted through archives and quizzed Rick Hanna, who as Garden librarian was resident collector of Allerton memorabilia, looking for clues about who they were and how they lived. I couldn't understand why two refined, cultured men had abandoned Chicago for a rural sugar plantation island. The common wisdom holds that Hawaii is a place for people who are running away from something.

Since John Allerton's death in 1986, the estate remained remarkably unchanged. Criminally so, I thought. A maximum of fifty people came for escorted tours each day, so few that their presence in the immense grounds was hardly noticeable. I privately felt it was a miracle that even fifty showed up. Many tourist maps of Kauai did not note the garden's presence. Wherever I went on the island, I was met with ignorance about its existence. “Oh yeah, isn't that private, for rich
haoles
(white people) from the mainland?” people asked.

I followed behind as Dr. Klein led our guests past a gurgling cascade of water that spilled over a wall of lava rock into a deep pool. Climbing up a narrow stone staircase, we came to the most photographed of the Allerton garden rooms. Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, watched over a mossy reflecting basin wearing a blank smile frozen in stone. A white wooden temple unveiled alcoves displaying fey stone statues of naked adolescent boys. “Water is the soul of a garden,” Dr. Klein told the group. “The Allertons had astutely or ganized the estate around dozens of natural and man-made springs, beginning with the Lawai Stream that runs down the middle like a spine.” We stood at the edge of the Diana Room and looked out over the stream to a
grove of stately fifty-foot-tall royal palms that rose like Egyptian columns. “Fresh water from the hills above the valley,” continued Dr. Klein, “feeds the many fountains, pools, and dripping rock walls. It was with these fountains that the Allertons allowed their imaginations, as well as their classical inclinations, to run riot.”

Then down the steps and onto some of the other tour highlights: the Three Pools; the Shell Fountain that spilled water from giant shell to giant shell down a fern-shrouded hill; the Mermaid Fountain with its bronze nymphs poised at either end of an undulating shaft of water that glinted in the golden afternoon sun. Tourists liked to hide between the giant roots of a Moreton Bay fig, the cozy nooks used in the movie
Jurassic Park
as a nest for dinosaur eggs to hatch.

“In no way does Allerton Garden resemble a natural Hawaiian landscape,” lectured Dr. Klein in the voice of a professor who retained a childlike enthusiasm for his subject. “It is an unleashed fantasy of nature, a Chicagoan's view of a paradisiacal jungle. It is jammed with tropical greenery and flowers from all over the world.”

I lagged behind the group but could hear his voice: “An obscured view heightens the mystery. The genius of Allerton Garden lies in its vistas enticingly veiled from view, its miles of paths and worn stone staircases that beckon to hidden trails and valleys. . . .”

Al most nobody builds gardens this size anymore. The grand du Pont gardens of Winterthur and Longwood Gardens and the Filoli estate south of San Francisco are able to keep their gates open only because they are tax-exempt institutions supported by a paying public. To aspire to garden on this scale requires
not only a great fortune, but patience. The designer must put aside his need for hurry and self-gratification, and look ahead one hundred years to forecast how his plan will look in full maturity.

The Allertons' vision will only be sus tained if kept alive by our staff gardeners. For without them, predators would take over. Even so, a few plant tendrils spilled over the walls. Dr. Klein fingered a curl of vine, and even from a distance I saw his eyes twinkle. I knew what was coming — one of his favorite lines. He delivered it perfectly. “In the best gardens, like this one, God seems to be winning a little.”

Dr. Klein seemed happiest when he was here in his domain, expounding on what the garden meant to us humans. To him, the garden was the supreme achievement, a work of art and a place for serious scientific inquiry. Within its green boundaries it housed painting, sculpture, mosaics, and fountains. Its transformational quality inspired music and served as a setting for its performance. A Noah's Ark, he called it, as the garden collected some of the earth's most endangered flora and was also a laboratory for studying biology, evolution, and the very mysteries of life.

The group moved ahead and disappeared out of sight around a bend in the path. The visitors were enthralled by Dr. Klein and wouldn't miss my absence for a while. I loved this time in the garden, when the staff had all gone and silence descended. All I could hear was a whisper of palm fronds. The tension between voracious jungle and managed design on such a large scale felt almost like a physical presence, and quite overwhelming. The very same philodendron vines grown as houseplants on the mainland here produced gargantuan, elephant-eared ropes,
barely caged behind rock walls. I had seen gardeners hacking the growth back with machetes that seemed too puny for the task. I crunched along the cinder path to my favorite spot, a maze of tropical blooms in the Cutting Garden. Tall spears of pink and crimson torch gingers created a fragrant, impenetrable jungle. Near the ground, waxy orange heliconias sprouted like Martian mushrooms. As I penetrated further, I saw a beefsteak heliconia hanging overhead, its blood-red mass the size and shape of a rack of ribs. Try working
that
into an arrangement.