I was watering my coffee plants, early one morning, when I heard a loud buzzing noise. I looked up and saw bees all over the flowers of a palm tree on the edge of the yard. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed the tree had flowers as they’re rather dwarfed by the profusion of fronds. But there are a lot of these small yellow flowers and the bees obviously approve.
There are many things to like about this orchid. It’s a beautiful flower. It’s an epiphyte, growing on the trunk of a tree. It hosts a small hover fly, which I didn’t notice at the time. And it has a handy tag attached, identifying what it is, which I also didn’t see until later.
There’s an interesting story about the discovery of this flower here.
The Kohala Ditch was built in the early 1900s to carry water from the wet slopes of Kohala Mountain, to the sometimes drought-prone sugar cane fields of Kohala. A series of tunnels, flumes and ditches channeled water through ridges and over gullies for a distance of 14 miles.
After the sugar cane industry folded, ditch water continued to be used by other agricultural activities. But this valuable resource was always beset by difficulties. The challenging landscape was prone to landslides and flooding. Flumes were washed away, tunnels blocked. Increasingly expensive and time-consuming repairs did not provide the same economic benefit they once did.
After one such event, a few years ago, the operator of the ditch said it would no longer be repaired and maintained.
The top photo shows a section of the ditch in 2016. The others show how it looks today, in places, overgrown with weeds and even trees. In some areas it’s more manicured by those living next to it. In the meantime, access to water is a considerable problem, especially as dry weather is increasingly common in the area.
The current Governor of Hawaii knows this region well and money has been earmarked for finding a solution to the area’s water shortage, but when and how that happens is still very much in the pipeline!
For more information about the history of the Kohala Ditch, go to fluminkohala.com/the-kohala-ditch.
A Monarch Butterfly caterpillar munches along the edges of an Hawaiian Crown Flower (Calotropis gigantea).
Late afternoon sun illuminates an hibiscus flower.
Dragon fruit is native to Central America, but is found in tropical and subtropical places worldwide these days. It grows on what used to be called the Hylocereus cactus, now known as Selenicereus cactus. It comes in three varieties, but the most common, with pink-skinned fruit and white flesh, is Selenicereus undatus.
This cactus is a climber and the one I’ve been taking photos of is growing up a tree branch in my neighbor’s yard. It takes a while for the plant to become mature enough to flower. The flowers bloom at night and are short-lived. I didn’t know this when I was driving to work one early morning and, in Kawaihae, saw two dragon fruit plants with a stunning array of blooms. I thought, I must get a photo of those on the way home and, amazingly, remembered this later in the day. But when I passed through Kawaihae, every single bloom had already wilted!
I did get photos of the neighbor’s flowers, but they were equally short-lived. After that it takes a while for the fruits to form, with the dead flower still hanging from it.
The fruit grows over time, but it’s not until it starts turning pink that it needs to be more closely watched. Ripe fruit will become a little softer to gentle pressure, as with avocados, and the scaly spikes sticking out from the fruit will start to turn brown and wilt.
Once the fruit is ripe, it can be cut open to reveal the seed-speckled flesh, which can easily be scooped out with a spoon. The flavor is a bit like a cross between kiwifruit and pear.
This Large Orange Sulphur Butterfly blends in rather well amongst these Plumeria flowers. I didn’t see it feeding here, but that likely was its intention.
A bee lands on an endemic Maiapilo flower before working its way up to collect pollen.
Graham's Island 