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Updated: May 31, 2025
The candlenut, the ama, with its lilac bloom, the hibiscus and pandanus, green and glossy, the petavii, a kind of banana the curving fronds of which spread high in air, the snake-plant, makomako, a yellow-flowered shrub, and many others none of us could name, carpeted the farther mountain-sides with brilliant colors. Everywhere were cocoanuts, guavas, and mangos.
The trellises in the gardens seem overgrown with stephanotis, mauve and purple passion-flowers, and all kinds of rare creepers, the purple and white hibiscus shoots up some fourteen to sixteen feet in height; bananas, full of fruit and flower, strelitzias, heliotrope, geraniums, and pelargoniums, bloom all around in large shrubs, mixed with palms and mimosas of every variety; and the whole formed such an enchanting picture that we were loth to tear ourselves away.
We strolled about the streets of the white folks' little town, and around over the hills by paths and roads among European dwellings and gardens and plantations, and past clumps of hibiscus that made a body blink, the great blossoms were so intensely red; and by and by we stopped to ask an elderly English colonist a question or two, and to sympathize with him concerning the torrid weather; but he was surprised, and said: "This?
A majestic wahine with small, bare feet, a grand, swinging, deliberate gait, hibiscus blossoms in her flowing hair, and a le of yellow flowers falling over her holuku, marching through these streets, has a tragic grandeur of appearance, which makes the diminutive, fair- skinned haole, tottering along hesitatingly in high-heeled shoes, look grotesque by comparison.
But the grave of Gauguin, the great painter, was unmarked. If a board had been placed at its head when he was buried, it had rotted away, and nothing was left to indicate where he was lying. The hibiscus was blood-red on the sunken graves, and cocoanuts sprouted in the tangled grass.
The forest here was composed for the most part of trees which had already been met with near the lake and on Prospect Heights. There were deodars, Douglas firs, casuarinas, gum trees, eucalypti, hibiscus, cedars, and other trees, generally of a moderate size, for their number prevented their growth.
These are called Fire or Fever Trees, since they have the appearance of being on fire and bloom in the hot season when fever is most prevalent. Other trees whose name I do not recall bear equally large clusters of purple flowers. The palms are large and grow in great luxuriance, and the double hibiscus look like large pinks. The market day is the great day of every town.
This narrow northern spit was also quite low, fringed with coconut palms, and covered with low, dense scrub, as was the southern spit for a distance of some two miles, while the land to the east and west of the gulf rose up in a series of lofty peaks, tree-crowned to their summits, the vegetation seeming to consist mostly of ceibas, palms, bois immortelles, bamboo, tree ferns, calabash trees, crimson-hued hibiscus, and other tropical trees, gorgeous now with multi-coloured blossoms, the whole presenting a most beautiful and delectable picture as it shimmered under the rays of the mid-day sun.
A bush of yellow-flowered hibiscus clothes the banks that are less level; and, higher still, grows a tall and beautiful mimosa with feathery web and pendent pods of brightest green and yellow. Then came the brabs and palms, fan-, cocoa-, oil-, and bamboo-, with their trunks turned to nurseries of epiphytes and air-plants. The parasites are clematis and a host with hard botanical names.
There were also some of the yellow, bell-shaped flowers called "campanilo," and a variety of the hibiscus which we learned to call "coral hibiscus," but which in the Philippines is known as arana, or spider. The flowers of Honolulu and Manila seem very much alike. In neither place is there a wide variety of garden flowers, but there is an abundance of flowering shrubs and trees.
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