A pair of Brown Boobies skim over the water off the coast of North Kohala.
Brown Boobies
Category Archives: Scenes
View of Pu’u Wa’awa’a
A view of Pu’u Wa’awa’a and Hualalai beyond it. This is the time of year when Jacaranda trees are in bloom.
A Raccoon Butterflyfish says hello
I was snorkeling recently in a marine reserve where fishing is prohibited and the fish there are noticeably more mellow than those in my usual snorkeling spot, where fishing of all kinds takes place.
The Raccoon Butterflyfishes there passed close by without concern. Smaller groups maintained a tight formation, while the odd one wasn’t shy about checking me out.
Tree stump on the coast
An old tree stump snagged in a rocky shore on the South Kohala coast.
Home is where the tube is
The public parking area for shoreline access at Mauna Lani is some distance from the ocean. From the parking lot, the trail meanders across some old lava, but off to one side is this interesting little spot.
It’s part of an old lava tube that was used as a shelter by early Hawaiians. Lava tubes are created when lava flows crust over on top, creating an insulated tube that lava continues to flow through. When an eruption ends and the supply of lava disappears, the lava drains out of the tunnel it’s been flowing through and a hollow tube is left.
As the sign at the entrance says, the tube would have been cool during the heat of the day, but would also protect from wind and rain. These days, the floor is strewn with rocks, but when used for habitation, any rocks would have been removed leaving a reasonably smooth floor. In the photos, the ceiling looks low, but I’m over six feet tall and didn’t have to duck. It’s a big area.
The top photo shows the entrance taken from the back of the tube. The bottom photo is taken from the entrance, looking toward the back.
Giant Laulau
Giant Laulau (Syzygium megacarpa) is widespread across the Pacific. These red fruits apparently taste similar to apples though I haven’t yet tried one. This one was at Hawai’i Tropical Bioreserve & Garden.
For more information about Hawai’i Tropical Bioreserve & Garden, go to htbg.com.
Abstracts: Water patterns
I liked these shapes I saw on the surface of the water in one of the Mauna Lani fishponds on the South Kohala coast.
My tropical garden
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Fabulous Florals.’ See more responses here. For this, I’m taking a short jaunt off the island to revisit the first tropical garden I planted. That was in Washington State. Now, I’m aware that Washington State isn’t in the tropics, but I like a challenge.
My goal was to create a garden of hardy tropical-looking plants, with colorful flowers and/or big, bountiful foliage. The first summer, I laid the foundations with three Windmill Palms and a wall of bamboo alongside one fence. Colorful canna lillies and big foliage gave an inkling of what was to come.
The second summer was when the garden took off. Ground covers spread. Vines took off. Pots provided focal points.
And of course, there were those fabulous florals.
One corner of the garden featured a Dicksonia Antarctica tree fern, which was soon joined by a Dicentra Scandens-Golden tears vine, Eccremocarpus scaber – Chilean glory vine, and a Clematis Armandii. There’s less than a month between the second and third photos in the gallery below, and the following summer the area was rampant with color and growth.
But it is Washington State and there are winters and in the winter it can snow. The palms and bamboo bent low under the weight of the snow, but they survived. The tiki torch looked distinctly unhappy with the weather, possibly jealous of those lucky plants that were moved indoors for the winter.
Graham's Island 