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August 14, 2022 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Sugar/Forestry Connection

The early Polynesian settlers to Hawaiʻi brought sugar cane with them and demonstrated that it could be grown successfully in the islands.

As a later economic entity, sugar gradually replaced sandalwood and whaling in the mid‐19th century and became the principal industry in the islands, until it was succeeded by the visitor industry in 1960.

Hawaiʻi had the basic natural resources needed to grow sugar: land, sun and water. Hawai‘i’s economy turned toward sugar in the decades between 1860 and 1880; these twenty years were pivotal in building the plantation system.

Sugar‐cane farming gained this prestige without great difficulty because sugar cane soon proved to be the only available crop that could be grown profitably under the severe conditions imposed upon plants grown on the lands which were available for cultivation. (HSPA 1947)

A century after Captain James Cook’s arrival in Hawaiʻi, sugar plantations started to dominate the landscape. However, a shortage of laborers to work in the growing (in size and number) sugar plantations became a challenge. The only answer was imported labor.

There were three big waves of workforce immigration: Chinese 1852; Japanese 1885; and Filipinos 1905. Several smaller, but substantial, migrations also occurred: Portuguese 1877; Norwegians 1880; Germans 1881; Puerto Ricans 1900; Koreans 1902 and Spanish 1907.

It is not likely anyone then foresaw the impact this would have on the cultural and social structure of the islands. The sugar industry is at the center of Hawaiʻi’s modern diversity of races and ethnic cultures. Of the nearly 385,000 workers that came, many thousands stayed to become a part of Hawai‘i’s unique ethnic mix.

Hawai‘i continues to be one of the most culturally-diverse and racially-integrated places on the globe. Sugar changed the social fabric of Hawai‘i.

That is not the only influence that sugar production had in the Islands.

Interestingly, it was the sugar growers, significant users of Hawai‘i’s water resources, who led the forest reserve protection movement.

We are fortunate that a little over 100-years ago some forward thinkers had the good sense to set aside Hawai‘i’s forested lands and protected our forest watersheds under the State’s Forest Reserve system. While I was at DLNR, we oversaw these nearly 1-million acres of mauka lands.

The link between tree-planting and the sugar planters can be seen particularly clearly in the career of Harold Lyon, who arrived in Hawai‘i in 1907 as a plant pathologist in the employ of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA).

Diseases of sugar cane occupied Lyon’s efforts for several years, but his purview gradually broadened to include a variety of problems relating to Hawaiian agriculture, including deforestation. (Woodcock)

Lyon was a strong voice for forests. In an early report, he discussed the water situation on O‘ahu, the insufficient supplies of water available for agriculture, and the role of the forested high-elevation areas of the windward Ko‘olau in recharging the island’s aquifer.

He described the water budget and the action of forested watersheds in slowing the rate of runoff and increasing infiltration and flow of water to groundwater. (Woodcock)

It was evident to Lyon and others that deforestation was increasing runoff – water that was essentially lost to agriculture, since the topography of the islands, with their many short streams, makes impoundment, and in many cases diversion, impractical.

As evidence for the water-conserving role of vegetation, Lyon noted the drying out of many streams that had previously been more continuously flowing, an observation that by this time had been made repeatedly.

Lyon emphasized that the problem was not just increased demand for water but also the conditions determining supply – ‘‘The candle is burning at both ends and we only fan the flames’’ – and argued that resources should be committed to reforest the watersheds with ‘‘healthy, water-conserving forest’’. (Woodcock)

Neglect of the islands’ forests would be ‘‘suicidal,’’ for ‘‘everything fails with the failure of our water supply’’. (Lyon; Woodcock)

After more than a century of massive forest loss and destruction, the Territory of Hawai‘i acknowledged that preservation of the forest was vital to the future economic prosperity of the Islands.

Urged by sugarcane growers and government foresters concerned about the vanishing woodlands, the forest reserve system became the basis for the largest public-private partnership in the history of the Islands. (Last Stand)

On May 13, 1903, the Territory of Hawaiʻi, with the backing of the Hawaiʻi Sugar Planters’ Association, established the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry. (HDOA) The next year, Ralph Sheldon Hosmer became the first Superintendent of Forestry in the Islands.

The forest reserves were useful for two primary purposes: water production for the Territory’s agricultural industries, and timber production to meet the growing demand for wood products. The forest reserve system should not lead to “the locking up from economic use of a certain forest area.” (Hosmer)

Even in critical watersheds the harvesting of old trees “is a positive advantage, in that it gives the young trees a chance to grow, while at the same time producing a profit from the forests”. (LRB)

A main concern was finding an alternative to importing redwood and Douglas-fir from California for construction timbers. In 1904 the government nursery was asked to grow timber tree species instead of its usual ornamental, flowering trees (pines, cypress, cedar and Douglas fir.) (Anderson)

“As an influential board member on the Agriculture and Forestry Commission, Harold Lyon succeeded in persuading the Territorial Commission to import seed of a vast number of alien tree species. … nearly 1,000 alien species were outplanted in Hawaiʻi forest reserves.” (Mueller-Dombois)

Various trees and plants were imported from diverse areas of the world including Madagascar, Australia, India, Brazil, the Malay states, China, the Philippines, southern Europe, the East Indies, the West Indies, New Zealand, Central America and South Africa.

Trees that successfully survived the Mānoa Valley soil conditions and promoted water conservation were then widely planted throughout the arboretum

Eucalyptus species, silk oak, paperbark and ironwood were the most frequently planted trees due to their fast growth and their resistance to adverse environmental conditions. However, these very qualities, as well as their ability to seed profusely, would lead to some species such as tropical ash and albizia. (Iwashita)

The number of trees planted rose to many millions by the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was available for planting. From 1935 to 1941, with the help of the CCC, an average of close to two-million trees were planted per year in the forest reserves.

Lyon envisioned the plantations as a buffer zone that would be established between the remaining native forests and the lower-elevation agricultural lands to protect the native forests and perform the functions (maintaining input of water to aquifers.)

In his 1949 annual report to the HSPA entitled, ‘What is to be the fate of the arboretum?,’ Lyon declared the Mānoa Arboretum’s mission to test new plant introductions to be essentially complete; he believed that the HSPA should not remain the arboretum’s custodian.

On July 1, 1953, HSPA conveyed the Mānoa Arboretum to the Board of Regents of the University of Hawaiʻi. The regents were individually entrusted with the fiduciary duty of maintaining the arboretum. In 1962, the Board of Regents transferred the arboretum to the University of Hawaiʻi.

Dr. Lyon remained with the arboretum as its first director under the regents’ and university’s stewardship. After Dr. Lyon’s death in 1957, an advisory committee directed the arboretum until 1961, when Dr. George Gillette assumed the directorship on a part-time basis.

When Dr. Lyon died, the Board of Regents renamed the facility the Harold L Lyon Arboretum (Lyon Arboretum) in honor of the man so closely associated with its growth and fruition.

© 2022 Ho‘okuleana LLC

Filed Under: Economy, General, Place Names, Prominent People Tagged With: Foresty, Forest Reserve, HSPA, Lyon Arboretum, Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, Sugar, Harold Lyon

November 6, 2019 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Foster Botanical Garden

In 1853, Queen Kalama leased 4.6 acres of land to William Hillebrand, a botanist as well as a physician; he and his wife built a home in the upper terrace area of the present garden. The magnificent trees which now tower over this area were planted by him.

Six years after his arrival, he and nine other Honolulu physicians petitioned to charter an organization called the Hawaiian Medical Society. Today, it is the Hawaii Medical Association.

Appointed physician to the royal family at The Queen’s Hospital (now The Queen’s Medical Center), Hillebrand also served as chief physician at the hospital from 1860 to 1871.

While on a mission for the King to bring Chinese immigrants to work in the islands’ sugar fields, Hillebrand introduced Common Myna birds to Honolulu (as well as “carrion crows, gold finches, Japanese finches, Chinese quail, ricebirds, Indian sparrows; golden, silver and Mongolian pheasants; and [two] axis deer from China and Java”.)

After 20 years, Hillebrand returned to Germany, where he published Flora of the Hawaiian Islands in 1888.

In 1884, the Hillebrand property was sold Thomas R. Foster and his wife Mary E. Foster, who continued to develop the garden at their homesite.

In 1919, Foster leased two-acres to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association for its experiment station, under the direction of Dr. Harold L. Lyon, a botanist and plant pathologist.

Lyon proceeded to build on the work of plant conservation and landscape architecture which Dr. Hillebrand and Mrs. Foster had initiated. By 1925, his plant nursery had produced over a million trees, most of them exceptional varieties which were not grown elsewhere.

Hundreds of new species of trees and plants had been imported, cultivated and distributed throughout the Hawaiian Islands.

Upon Mrs. Foster’s death in 1930, the 5.5 acre site was bequeathed to the City and County of Honolulu as a public garden and was opened to the public on November 30, 1931, with Lyon as its first director.

Over a span of 27 years, Dr. Lyon introduced 10,000 new kinds of trees and plants to Hawaiʻi. The Foster Garden orchid collection was started with Dr. Lyon’s own plants.

Through purchases by the City and gifts from individuals, under the directorship of Paul R. Weissich (1957-89), Foster Garden expanded to over 13.5-acres and also developed four additional sites on Oahu Island to create the 650-acre Honolulu Botanical Gardens system (including, Hoʻomaluhia Botanical Garden, Koko Crater Botanical Garden, Liliʻuokalani Botanical Garden and Wahiawa Botanical Garden.)

Taken as a whole, these five gardens feature rare species from tropical environments ranging from desert to rainforest, comprising the largest and most diverse tropical plant collection in the United States.

In addition to being a pleasant place to visit, Foster Botanical Garden is a living museum of tropical plants, some rare and endangered, which have been collected from throughout the world’s tropics over a period of 150 years.

Today the garden consists of the Upper Terrace (the oldest part of the garden); Middle Terraces (palms, aroids, heliconias, gingers); Economic Garden (herbs, spices, dyes, poisons); Prehistoric Glen (primitive plants planted in 1965); Lyon Orchid Garden; and Hybrid Orchid Display.

It also contains a number of exceptional trees, including a Sacred Fig which is a clone descendant of the Bodhi tree that Buddha sat under for inspiration, a sapling of which was gifted to Mary Foster by Anagarika Dharmapala in 1913.

In 1975, the Hawaiʻi State Legislature found that rapid development had led to the destruction of many of the State’s exceptional trees and passed Act 105 – The Exceptional Tree Act.

The Act recognizes that trees are valuable for their beauty and they perform crucial ecological functions. All told, Foster Botanical Garden contains 25 of about 100 Oʻahu trees designated as exceptional.

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Foster_Botanical_Garden-sign
William_Hillebrand
William_Hillebrand
Mary_Elizabeth_Mikahala_Robinson_Foster
Mary_Elizabeth_Mikahala_Robinson_Foster
Baobab Tree, Adansonia digitata
Bo Tree, Ficus religiosa
Bodhi_tree_foster_botanical_gardens-Genetically identical to the Bodhi Tree (original) at Sri Mahabodhi temple, India
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MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
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MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Daibutsu-replica of the Great Buddha of Kamakura-dedicated in 1968 for centennial of Japanese immigration to Hawaii
Dendrobium_thyrsiflorum
Dischidia-imbricata-on-Millettia-pinnata
Doum Palm, Hyphaene thebaica
False Olive Tree, Elaeodendron orientale
Flowering_Talipot_Palm
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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Guama Tree, Lonchocarpus domingensis
Kapok Tree, Ceiba pentandra
Pili Nut Tree, Canarium vulgar
Tattele Tree, Pterogota alata
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Filed Under: General, Place Names, Prominent People Tagged With: Hawaii, Mary Foster, Queen's Medical Center, Queen's Hospital, Hawaii Sugar Planters, Harold Lyon, Foster Botanical Garden, Hilldebrand

May 25, 2016 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Mānoa Arboretum

Hahai nō ka ua i ka ululāʻau
The Rain Follows the Forest

“Not enough rain and not enough water in the streams are great evils”.

“It appears to me to be unnecessary to again go deeply into the theory of the relation between forests and rainfall when all intelligent and observing people admit that the decrease or increase of rainfall goes pari passu (‘hand-in-hand’) with the decrease or increase of the forests.”

“The forest, which not only produces rain, but also retains the rainwater, holding it among its leaves and branches, its undergrowth, its myriads of roots and rootlets and its fallen debris, letting the rainwater trickle down slowly to the water streams and keeping them supplied for a long time”.

“(T)hat forest is not there. Rain pours down, the water rushes in torrents through the streams to the sea and soon after everything is dry again.” (Gjerdrum to HSPA, 1897)

“The ultimate success of forestry in Hawaiʻi depends on the continued cooperation of individuals and private corporations with the Territorial Government.” (Board of Agriculture and Forestry, December 31, 1907)

In the early-1900s, Mānoa Valley’s lower slopes were stripped of their native vegetation by excessive agricultural cultivation and the overgrazing of cattle.

Without healthy forest cover, rainwater flowed to the ocean rather than recharging the ground water table, Hawaiʻi’s primary source of drinking water. This loss was of special concern to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA,) because sugar required great quantities of water.

In 1918, HSPA established Mānoa Arboretum in order to develop methods of watershed restoration, test tree species for reforestation and collect plants of economic value.

They put Dr Harold L Lyon, a young botanist from Minnesota, in charge of 124-acres at the back of Mānoa Valley. He was, at the same time, superintendent of the Territory’s Department of Botany and Forestation.

The site lies in the ʻili (land division) of Haukulu and ʻAihualama, in Mānoa. Several man-made features, including stone platforms, loʻi and the occurrence of many Polynesian-introduced plants note early use of the site.

One of Dr Lyon’s tasks at the arboretum was to identify trees suitable for rebuilding watersheds. Lyon observed that the adverse conditions of soil created from volcanic rock erosion appeared to affect the growth, survival and eventual death of many tree species.

He also noted that native plants did not thrive in areas that were previously trampled by cattle and other animals. The experiment station’s goal was to find trees that not only could survive in soil containing volcanic rock components, but also would comprise efficient water-conserving forests.

Mānoa Arboretum was a test site to evaluate trees that could be used for reforestation throughout the islands, and to test sugarcane seedlings. The test site became the basis of the Mānoa Arboretum.

Tree-planting was a coordinated effort involving Lyon, HSPA and Territorial Forestry under the direction of Ralph Sheldon Hosmer, the Territorial Forester. The early foresters planted many types of trees on an experimental basis, but concluded that native species were of limited utility and turned largely to introduced species for large-scale reforestation efforts. (Woodcock)

Lyon concluded that healthy forests should be preserved, that heavily damaged native forests could not recover on their own, and that damaged watersheds could be restored with introduced plants. Planting began in 1920, and was essentially completed by 1945.

“As an influential board member on the Agriculture and Forestry Commission, Harold Lyon succeeded in persuading the Territorial Commission to import seed of a vast number of alien tree species. … nearly 1,000 alien species were outplanted in Hawaiʻi forest reserves.” (Mueller-Dombois)

Various trees and plants were imported from diverse areas of the world including Madagascar, Australia, India, Brazil, the Malay states, China, the Philippines, southern Europe, the East Indies, the West Indies, New Zealand, Central America and South Africa. Trees that successfully survived the Mānoa Valley soil conditions and promoted water conservation were then widely planted throughout the arboretum

Eucalyptus species, silk oak, paperbark and ironwood were the most frequently planted trees due to their fast growth and their resistance to adverse environmental conditions. However, these very qualities, as well as their ability to seed profusely, would lead to some species such as tropical ash and albizia. (Iwashita)

The number of trees planted rose to many millions by the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was available for planting. From 1935 to 1941, with the help of the CCC, an average of close to two-million trees were planted per year in the forest reserves.

Lyon envisioned the plantations as a buffer zone that would be established between the remaining native forests and the lower-elevation agricultural lands to protect the native forests and perform the functions (maintaining input of water to aquifers.)

This large-scale attempt to engineer nature was probably the largest environmental project ever carried out in the islands. Forestry introductions have been a significant contributor to Hawaiʻi’s alien-species crisis, with many of these tree species now problem invasive species. (Woodcock)

In his 1949 annual report to the HSPA entitled, ‘What is to be the fate of the arboretum?,’ Lyon declared the Mānoa Arboretum’s mission to test new plant introductions to be essentially complete; he believed that the HSPA should not remain the arboretum’s custodian.

On July 1, 1953, HSPA conveyed the Mānoa Arboretum to the Board of Regents of the University of Hawaiʻi. The regents were individually entrusted with the fiduciary duty of maintaining the arboretum. In 1962, the Board of Regents transferred the arboretum to the University of Hawaiʻi.

Dr. Lyon remained with the arboretum as its first director under the regents’ and university’s stewardship. After Dr. Lyon’s death in 1957, an advisory committee directed the arboretum until 1961, when Dr. George Gillette assumed the directorship on a part-time basis.

When Dr. Lyon died, the Board of Regents renamed the facility the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum (Lyon Arboretum) in honor of the man so closely associated with its growth and fruition.

In the early years, eight cottages were built on the arboretum site for staff use. The cottages were given alphabetical designations, beginning with cottage “A” at the foot of the hill leading into the arboretum site and ending with cottage “H” at the top of the hill. Lands surrounding the cottages were planted with sugar cane. Dr. Lyon also erected an orchid greenhouse between cottages “F” and “G,” which is still used today.

Cottage “H” was expanded over time and is now the main center of the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum, housing offices, a reception area, an educational office, and a book and gift shop.

Forestry, Forest Reserves, Watershed Partnerships, invasive species and related water and habitat concerns were very much a part of daily activities when I was at DLNR.

Today, I am honored and proud to serve as a director on the Hawaiʻi Forest Institute, an organization dedicated to promote the health and productivity of Hawaiʻi’s forests, through forest restoration, educational programs, information dissemination and support for scientific research.

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Manoa-Valley-Manoa Arboretum-UH
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Harold L Lyon_Plaque-(hawaiimagazine)
Harold L Lyon_Plaque-(hawaiimagazine)
University of Hawaii campus, 1932.
University of Hawaii campus, 1932.
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Harold L Lyon_Arboretum-aerial-Group70
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Harold L Lyon_sign-UH
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Manoa_Valley-Baldwin-(DAGS)-Reg1068-1882

Filed Under: Economy, General Tagged With: Hawaii Sugar Planters, Manoa, Harold Lyon, HSPA, Lyon Arboretum, Hawaii, Oahu

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