Change is Always Afoot

Dear Friends,

Change is afoot in this forest-garden. It always is, of course. Sometimes the change is subtle, sometimes striking, always significant in its own way, on its own scale. Last week, one of the very first trees W.S. Merwin planted fell from its perch at the top of the slope down toward the valley floor. The tree was not a palm, but an ironwood. In his early days and weeks in Peʻahi, William planted a few of them on the barren land to break the wind and add nitrogen to the depleted soil—a gesture toward the land whose well-being he hoped to help restore. This wasn’t the first ironwood to fall; a few years ago, early in our stewardship, a kona storm brought down an exceptionally tall one, exposing the ground beneath to rays of sun for the first time in many years. Under the opening in an otherwise dense canopy of palms, both fallen ironwoods have now begun to decompose, as we, the current stewards of this land, witness yet another chapter of ecological succession: the trees William had planted to enliven the soil are now becoming soil themselves.

Just below the fallen ironwoods, one of the thousands of palms that thrive in revitalized soil bends toward the end of its own life. A Metroxylon—one of my favorite palms, with its dramatic lashes that lengthen as they rise up the frond—is fruiting, for the first and only time. The fruit falls and tumbles down the slope, where our horticulturist Sarah Bryce picks it up, then harvests and sows the seeds. Down in the shadehouse, a new Metroxylon has germinated. When one day, in a not-so-distant future, its ancestor completes its life cycle, this small palm will have begun its own reach for the canopy, while future stewards witness and participate, by turns, in the garden’s steady and striking change.

With gratitude for your care of this special place,

Sonnet