The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-09-15

: WHAT A BOTANIST
MAY SEE IN HONOLULU
By Albert B. Lyons ND. In Thrums Annual

plants which in temperate chimes must
I be kept III pots half the year for fear OF
injury from frost can hardly understand
/ what | mean when speak OF this plant
as in complete possession, but on Oahu
it is not frost but drought that it has
to contend WITH and If seems impossI-
bic TO scorch the life out Oh the plant.
In tropical climate its growth IS as
tenishingly robust. Three or four feet
in height is minimum; except IN parch-
ed regions, FIVE or eight feet is more
common. and III the borders OF the for.
ests where moisture IS abundant, It be-
comes almost a tree. | have a piece OF
one of the trunks that measures fully
four inches in diameter; the plant, sup
ported as it was by. neighboring forest
trees, was not less than twenty feet
high But however favorable the china
tic environment. the lantana could never
have spread as it has without assistance.
1t found an aliv in the newly introduced
mynah bird, which feeds on its fruit and
& so scatters far and wide its seeds.
Returning to the city, where lantana
is prescribed, we look about for garden
/ flowers. Every dwelling of any preten-
sion shows evidence of the care of a
ward man. who keeps up the grounds.
, IT
+, tend a flower bed. but it is quite the ex-
ception to find that he has done this.
In place of Towering plants, you will
find bordering the driveway and about
the dwelling foliage plants and ferns
rather than flowers. Is it because the
yard man is not skilled horticulturist,
or is there good reason why preference
is given to the foliage plant? Custom or
fashion has something TO do with 1t, but
custom is generally based on reason, and
here it IS evident in the first place that
shade-loving plants must have the pre-
ference, and in the second that plants
which retain their beauty the year round.
and year after year willsin the natural
course of things displace in a little
while the Towering plants which are not
equally perennial.
There is another reason. The eye de-
lights in color. and will not be content
with the beauty of form alone. But in
Honolulu the flower bed is not a neces-
sity in order to satisfy this craving. 1t
one has few oleander shrubS-not the
spindling little plants seen IN some coun-
tries in tubs, but perennial sheaves OF
bloom. redolent of perfume: and Ala
manda vine shading the veranda, and
gorgeous the year round with its great
giving generously blue to supplement- the
gold, or if a richer blue is sought,
Clitoria vine: hedge of scarlet Hisbls-
cts perpetually in bloom, and one or two
Plunierias, that may be ungainly-rr as
pect for month or two when the leaves
drop from their club like stems, but
which make ample atonernent the rest
of the year in the profusion of, their
fragrant, exauisitely nodded, delicately
tinted starlike blossoms; if one has a
few plants like these he may rest salts
fed as regards his appetite for color.
Even without this, he may have all
through the summer months almost a
surfeit of color A rleighbor has perhaps
an arbor covered with Bougainvillea
vine, When the poisoning time comes,
the deep green of its foliage will be
hecked at first with a rudy purple
more accurately magenta-but soon the
patches of color will spread and become
continent, until the whole arbor is
mass of purple 1t seems like an expert
ment in decorative art belonging to
primitive and barbaric stage. You are
not sorry that nature has not yet re-
peated it. There are varieties of Bou-
gainvillea, however, of a more pleasing
color-salfnon, brick red, even an orange
scarlet. What is remarkable in all is
that it is not the flowers at all that are
thus colored 1t IS only the bracts that
enclose the jnconspicuous flower clus-
ters The plant is of the same family
as the four O'Clock, in which, botanists
tell us that the colored part is calyx, not
corolla.
Another vine often trained over
porches and barns, Bignonia, but UNI
like the Trumpet Creeper. makes the
Bougainvillea envious when it puts on
its gala dress. Here AGAIN is solid color,
but no longer the suggestions of the dye
vat 1t is the color of LIVING fame, not
uniform in tint. but full of lights and
shades such as belong to veritable fame,
and the plant wears this gorgeous attire
wholly concealing the every day garment
of green which it covers, for weeks at
time, and more than once in the year.
More priced but less common is the
Stephanotis, whose fragrant clusters in
their season transform the trellis into a
snow bank.
The same snow effect is produced
when the ungainly heshy stems of the
nightblooming cereus (Cereus triquetra)
which are piled up on stone fences, max
ing the semblance of an evergreen hedge,
ciothe themselves, as they do once in
three or four weeks. through the sum-
mer months, with their giant lily bios
sons. There is one of those hedges at
Oahu College continuous stretch of
two hundred wards, on which it is a
common thing to see two thousand bios
SONS at once-sonletimes there have
been three or four times that number
OF course this snow melts under the
morning sun BY nine O'Clock in the
morning the glory IS departed, although
the following night may see it restored
The plant blossoms two nights in sue
cession, with perhaps a few belated