Constant humidity and rain keep even the steepest cliffs green and lush on Kauai’s north shore. Photo © Jessica MacMurray Blaine.

By Jessica MacMurray Blaine
Forest Magazine, Winter 2004

Limahuli Garden and Preserve occupies a slice of Kauai’s north side, running from the upland zone at the island’s peak down to the ocean. At its broad base, there’s a freshwater pool, the Limahuli Stream’s final gathering place before plunging onward to the coral reefs and ocean a few hundred yards away. Half a mile past the pool, the road that nearly circumnavigates the island ends in a shady parking lot, a sandy beach and a trailhead leading hikers into the Na Pali Coast. Some visitors to this last point of civilization stop and take a tour of the formal garden that is part of the preserve: ancient terraces, planted with trembling taro and picturesque torch ginger. But very few have the opportunity to venture past the thirteen acres open for public viewing and into the preserve, where one of the world’s leading-edge monitoring and forest restoration projects is happening. The valley is private land that, with the help of the people who own it and a panoply of partners, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy, is being returned to a more balanced natural state.

Juliet Rice Wichman rode through this valley on horseback as a child in the early part of the twentieth century. In her travels she learned about the traditions of the Hawaiian people from her grandfather. Inspired to protect and restore Kauai’s botanical heritage and cultural artifacts, Wichman devoted her life to horticulture and plants on Kauai.

Wichman purchased the 1,000-acre Limahuli valley in the early 1960s, a time when beachfront property values were skyrocketing and the fertile grazing and agricultural inland valleys were cheap. She fenced out the cattle that had been grazing there and trampling native plants and archaeological features for a century and began a program of conservation that started with the establishment of the Limahuli Garden and Preserve in 1967.

Almost ten years later, she donated thirteen acres that would become the public garden to the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and after her death in 1987, her grandson, Charles Wichman, and his wife took over the stewardship of the preserve. They donated the adjoining 989 acres to the botanical garden in 1994. Wichman, as director of the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, began an aggressive campaign of restoration and monitoring from the uplands down to the coral reefs off the coast.

The Wichmans established partnerships with a variety of public and private agencies to further their research, monitoring and restoration. The Forest Service gave the preserve a grant early on to research methodology for various restoration projects. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided funding over the last decade to support helicopter time, staff and supplies in the efforts, via habitat restoration and direct population enhancement, to protect endangered species and candidate species. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded a massive project to clear a tangle of hau trees that had been blocking the stream and inhibiting the migration of native fish. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service supported work on species restoration sites in the lower preserve.

Crews, both volunteer and professional, are working hard to bring the forest ecosystems in the valley back into balance. Their wide-ranging efforts include seed collection, tissue culture, GPS mapping and stream monitoring.

The valley is divided by an 800-foot waterfall. The upper section, 400 acres of pristine native ohia rain forest, provides habitat for some of Hawaii’s most endangered plants and birds. Work crews, which can access the upper part of the preserve only by helicopter, are building a fence line along the steep ridges bordering the valley to keep out feral pigs. The lower section, where most of the damage from cattle occurred, is a combination of mesic and wet forest environments, and the staff is working to clear invasives and replant a number of sites with natives. Only pockets of the original native lowland rain forest exist here, having been out-competed by guava, coffee and octopus trees.

In documenting and protecting the valley, Wichman and his teams discovered new plant species, some of which are found nowhere else. Careful seed collection, tissue culture and nursery propagation have allowed the National Tropical Botanical Garden to reinvigorate some species, including an endemic species of hibiscus that was thought to be extinct.

For the Wichmans, the most important goal of the preserve is to restore the idea of the ahupua´a. Based loosely on watersheds, the Hawaiian tradition of ahupua´a is a way of dividing and managing land—and thus, resources. “At the core of the ahupua´a system are the cultural values of aloha´aina and malam´aina,” Wichman says, “which represent the cultural responsibility to love and care for the natural world from a familial perspective.” The Limahuli Garden and Preserve coincides with the Ha´ena ahupua´a, and its bounty, spreading from the high mountain ecoystem down through the lowlands and into the sea, provided sustenance for the people who inhabited the land long before it became a preserve. The conservation programs at Limahuli are devoted to every level of the ahupua´a.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE