Waking Up in Eden (8 page)

All of Kauai went into high alert in the weeks preceding the June 4, 1942, Battle of Midway. Extra hospital beds and supplies were prepared and nurses were called to emergency duty. Only years later would the people of Kauai learn that the American military had cracked the Japanese code, allowing a strategic attack on the Imperial Japanese Navy. The rout was so complete, with so few American casualties, that no wounded ever arrived on Kauai. The Battle of Midway not only effectively eliminated the core of the Japanese Navy; it removed the Hawaiian Island chain from any real danger of invasion. For the rest of the war Kauai offered an exotic idyll for those stationed there, peacefully coexisting with the doting populace.

Throughout the military occupation, Kauai families eagerly invited soldiers home for dinners, picnics, and dances. The “Tired Pilots” program had begun on Oahu as a way for the locals to host aviators at their homes to give them some R & R. Robert and John quickly volunteered to host their share. They held concerts on the lawn for servicemen, a hundred at a time, who sat in their dress khakis with arms folded over knees, shaded by coconut palms. The barbed wire off Lawai-Kai trapped seaweed and debris, becoming so tangled and thick with vegetation that it blocked the ocean view. But the wire barriers floated on rafts, and those who knew how could part them to swim. Lawai-Kai became a beach spot for off-duty officers. The Allertons invited them for lunch, for luaus, for quiet strolls in the garden. A steady parade of crisp Navy whites and Army tans came and went.

For the Allertons, not only was it patriotic, it was exciting. James Michener would later write about the pent-up sexuality of young military men cast adrift on a tropical island, in
his
Tales of the South Pacific,
later made into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The 1958 movie version was filmed entirely on Kauai, including a scene shot in Allerton Garden in which Lieutenant Cable and his Polynesian lover, Liat, raced laughingly through the jungle.

The steamy, sexy vibrations that electrified the Allerton estate in the war years were likely of an entirely different nature. The war changed everything for gay men and women alike. Before, they had mostly lived their lives in isolation, only a few urbanites finding companions in shrouded nightclubs. The draft brought gay servicemen and women together in droves to share their stories and experiences. The war turned into a watershed event for gay identity. Emboldened, they started to come out of the closet.

During those war years, Kauai plantation society courted the Allertons, inviting them to their black-tie yacht club parties, family weddings, and cocktail parties. In turn, the Allertons welcomed them to Lawai-Kai, becoming entwined with the island wealthy. Before Pearl Harbor, they had been outsiders. After the war, the islanders agreed: They were one of us. Charmed by the summers as well as the winters in Hawaii, the Allertons decided after peace was declared to move full-time to their Kauai estate. They never mentioned to anyone that Illinois was becoming inhospitable to “their kind” and remained somewhat mysterious. “You could only get so close,” one acquaintance told me, “and then a wall went up.”

M
IKE FAYE HAD
promised that the cottage would be ready in six weeks, but after two months, renovations continued to drag on. The Kleins invited me to use their
ohana
(Hawaiian for
family,
also used to describe a mother-in-law suite) with its own entrance through their garage. Their house itself was built like a ship, with a two-story prow pointing to a distant ocean view. In the back courtyard, a red lightbulb lit a steaming hot tub so it bubbled like a volcano. I imagined Dr. Klein boiling there in royal splendor. Behind his back I called him “the Grand Poobah,” for all his treasured executive perks: the reserved parking space in the headquarters' parking lot, his secretary and assistant to keep his calendar and arrange his travel like a
Fortune
500 chieftain, and his frequent reference to himself in the third person as “the executive director.”

For dinner I often fetched takeout from Kalaheo Steak House. After my usual order of prime rib and salad, I sometimes fed bits to a friendly stray cat that had taken up residence on my door stoop. I had a weakness for tiger-striped cats and starting calling him Sam. No matter what time I arrived home, he waited for me. One early evening, I lifted him as I closed
the apartment door behind me. He laid his head against mine and purred. “Okay, Sam, that's enough,” I murmured. “See you later.”

I drove back to Garden headquarters for some after-hours work. The full moon lit my way as I went through the usual rigamarole — unlocking the padlocked gate to the entrance, swinging open the gate, driving through, stopping, relocking the gate behind me, parking in the dark. I groped my way along the unlit lanai, used my key to open the front door, and rushed to punch in the security code — P-L-A-N-T — before the alarm sounded and summoned the police. The lights in my office formed a small island in the black night. It gave me the creeps sometimes to work here alone, but the lack of interruption meant I could focus on the papers, files, and reports spread out in stacks on my desk and across the carpet.

I searched for something to write about the Garden. Dr. Klein had already rushed us into a $10 million fund-raising campaign. He had gone through the prescribed step of commissioning a feasibility study to assess a target goal. He drafted a master plan detailing conceptual blueprints for each of the five sites. Not only did he envision improved roadways and trails, but a new entrance to Allerton Garden, a $1 million science building, new greenhouses, and several new endowed chairs to bring in top scientists. He freely adopted Chicago architect Daniel Burham's motto as his own: “Make no small plans; they have no power to seize men's minds.” From the beginning of my tenure at the Garden, various trustees would pull me aside to urge: Rein Klein in! There's a guy who could spend $100 million and it wouldn't be enough, commented one.

Bill functioned as the star, the front man who stroked the donors, while I cleaned up behind him as a glorified aide-de-camp. It fell to me to make rational sense of his grandiose projects, to put prices on them, then wrap them up in attractive packages. And I struggled. What could I say about the Garden, an institution that had sold itself on its potential for thirty years? Other botanical gardens around the country operated as big businesses, with multimillion-dollar-per-year gift shops, rental fees for weddings, symphony evenings, lectures, and full education programs. We had none of those.

What is a botanical garden? The name has been applied to gardens ranging from extensive research facilities associated with major universities and botanical institutes to tiny municipal parks that support little or no scientific activity. Many public and private “display gardens” — such as Allerton Garden — contain superb plant collections but do not provide labeling or maintain records on the plants in their collections.

The official definition comes from the
Botanic Gardens Conservation Strategy,
published in 1989 by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. It states that a botanical garden contains “scientifically ordered and maintained collections of plants, usually documented and labeled, and open to the public for the purposes of recreation, education and research.”

NTBG didn't do well by those criteria either. Bill Klein had asked an old Air Force buddy and fellow botanist, Dr. Richard Mandell, to come out and survey the NTBG collections. He found that two-thirds of the plant holdings in the garden had lost their labels, had disappeared, and/or were of unknown provenance.

I flipped through a thick file. In 1989, the Garden won a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to botanize the islands, that is, send field researchers out to find out what plants and how many grew there. Botanical records for Hawaii date back to 1779, when amateur botanist David Nelson sailed with Captain Cook and collected samples, which he took back to England. But for the next two hundred years, much of the islands' difficult terrain lay unexplored by botanists.

All of the Garden's five botanists and horticulturists in the Plant Science Department functioned as field collectors. Two of them, Steve Perlman and Ken Wood, used climbing equipment to scale vertical cliff ledges and rock columns, reaching habitats and ecosystems never examined before by any man, much less a botanist. The last of the completely untouched Hawaiian landscape survives only on these breathtakingly narrow snippets of land and ledges, undisturbed by encroaching agriculture or feral pigs or goats.

Perlman and Wood produced impressive results. They discovered twenty-nine new plant species and rediscovered another twenty-two thought to be extinct. At the bottom of a page summarizing the Garden's explorations, I found a short paragraph set off, in smaller, agate type:

Since 1990, NTBG has conducted 893 field expeditions throughout the Hawaiian Islands, atolls, and promontories. This is the most comprehensive survey of the Hawaiian Islands ever undertaken.

Eureka!

As I dug further, I discovered another unheralded factoid buried in Garden reports: A part-time nursery worker named
Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger had developed growing methods for more than 75 percent of all native Hawaiian plants, another feat never before accomplished.

I could see a narrative: The Garden's daring explorers climbed remote regions of Hawaii to search for plants once thought extinct. They discovered lost species and brought back rare seeds to the botanical garden. There, the pioneering horticulturist coaxed life from them in experimental growing techniques. In the botanical garden, rare plants flowered in protection, ready to repopulate the earth.

Our north shore garden, Limahuli, was already attracting attention for its conservation efforts. I had immediately liked its young director, Chipper Wichman, who envisioned that the entire one-thousand-acre Limahuli Valley could be protected in its nearly pristine state, then used as a repository for rare nursery seedlings. Chipper, a boyish, lanky man in his forties, had shown such promise that Bill Klein further encouraged him as his logical successor to the entire NTBG empire.

O
NE PLANT IN PARTICULAR
,
Brighamia insignis,
showed how a brave plant hunter could single-handedly save a species. Steve Perlman had rescued this strange-looking plant with its bulbous base sprouting an elephant-skinned pole topped by a cabbage-like burst of foliage. In order to flesh out my story line, I frequently walked down the lanai to the Science Building to catch Perlman. I learned to look for piles of mud-stained backpacks outside his office, indicating that he had returned from a collecting trip.

“To me,
Brighamia
is a world class–looking plant,” Perlman enthused when I found him one day in the Garden's herbarium,
the seed and dried specimen repository that always smelled of formaldehyde. “They get a huge water storage base. They're six feet tall. The leaves are nothing much, but the flowers are.” The
Brighamia insignis
species on Kauai sends out waxy clusters of tubular flowers, lemon in color. On the sea cliffs of Molokai, its other primary habitat, another variety produces cream-colored flowers. “Put it all together, it's a really spectacular-looking plant,” he said. “I really like it.”

Perlman had arrived on Kauai in the 1970s, drawn by the surfing, a sport that almost took his life. A monster wave at Polihale Beach broke his neck a couple of decades ago. He recovered, and although he has since broken other small parts — toes, fingers, and a cracked rib — it never deterred him from either riding waves or climbing treacherous slopes.

He first worked on Kauai as a nurseryman on a private estate, spending his spare time hiking the island and learning its terrain. As he became enamored of the native Hawaiian plant story, he studied horticulture at Kauai Community College and enrolled in the first class of student interns at the Garden, then named the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden. When the Garden hired him, he apprenticed himself to staff botanist Derral Herbst for field collecting trips. Herbst, more stout, didn't like to climb trees or cliffs, so Perlman scrambled up them. Fashioning a homemade harness and knotted ropes, he would attach one end to a sturdy tree at the top of a cliff, then rappel down. As he became more skilled and learned to use professional climbing gear, he embarked on his own field investigations, employing mules, boats, and helicopters to drop him off on islets and rock pinnacles to reach those inaccessible nether regions.

Now in his forties, Perlman had grown only more impassioned, if possible, about his mission to botanize the untrammeled islands of the Pacific. Sun had bleached his fringe of blond hair to almost white, in sharp contrast to a tan that seemed to seep down to the bone, making his blue eyes appear the color of lake ice. If he could choose, he'd spend most of his time in the field. Few can keep up with him on his explorations, or want to, as many trips involve weeks of rough camping. “A lot of people can hike two or three days, but it's the fourth or fifth day on a trip that is the tough one,” he says.

I remembered my first botanizing trip, to the New Jersey Pine Barrens with Philadelphia botanist Ernest Schuyler, to research a story about a rare disappearing but nondescript grass. We tramped for hours through a hot haze of golden grass marshes, discovering sundews — insect-catching bog plants — and a myriad of grass sedges that all looked alike to my novice eye. After hours we sat down in the shade to rest, me fidgeting all the while. “You're going to have to learn patience,” Schuyler told me.

Perlman first saw
Brighamia insignis
through binoculars as he stood, looking up, from the bottom of vertical sea cliffs on Kauai's Na Pali Coast. Two thousand feet above him, at the very edge of a rock ledge, a magnificent six-foot-tall specimen swayed back and forth on its bowling-pin-shaped base. Excited, Perlman shared his discovery with Harold St. John, chief botanist at Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum. St. John suggested trying to grow it, so in order to collect seeds, Perlman scrambled up the cliff and rappelled down into a drift of more than one hundred
Brighamia
plants. An intimate love affair began.