By Heidi Bornhorst

For many years Hawaii folks who care about sustaining our Hawaiian environment, growing the appropriate tough, xeric and beautiful Hawaiian plants and our unique scenic beauty have asked the DOT to beautify our highways with native plants or better adapted ornamentals with good maintenance techniques and safe oversight. And nobody wants it to cost us more in taxes. We want Federal Highway beautification monies to be used in a common sense, Hawaiian-Style Landscape way.

Lots of people grumble about how it looks or the lack of maintenance of new plantings, but encouraging the growth of Hawaiian style landscaping is a long term, difficult challenge, that takes a team committed to our green and sustained future.

None of us like weedeaters blasting the paint off our cars and kids as we drive by and what a noisy waste of labor, gas and oil, to trim huge swaths of alien grass on freeway slopes. Dacus and the amazing team of Engineers, planners and landscape designers are working thru channels, with large scale long term plans that take all aspects of road and highway design and long term maintenance into consideration. Its way more complicated than we can imagine. We want it to be safe for drivers but with our traffic on an island at least give us a nice view as we chill in our cars.

And shouldn't Hawaii roads and by ways, the streets in our communities, look and feel, from a plant perspective, like we are in our Hawaiian home? There are so many adapted and good looking native Hawaiian trees and non-weedy ornamental, shrubs, groundcovers and grasses. We could be akamai-wai (smart about our precious Hawaiian water - after our 'aina and people, water is our most precious (and under valued in Modern Hawaii) resource. Some roadside plantings or lack thereof look like we could be in barren desert-ized Arizona, or desolate Texas.

Courageous nursery growers are figuring out how to grow and maintain about 30 top native Hawaiian plants within just the last 20 years or so. People like Anna Palomino on Maui, Lyon Arboretum, Allie Atkins on Hawaii, Glen Nii in Hawaii kai, Audrey Newman of Ladybug nursery in Waimanalo, Alvin Tsuruda of Waihale Products, Rick Barboza, Matt Shirman, Dennis Kim, are now offering Hawaiian plants for sale for restoring Kaho`olawe, planting in our home gardens, and gracing our roads, like never before in Hawaiian history.

We are finally seeing positive action in this direction. Just look at Ala Moana Boulevard, Kahekili Highway, Mokulele Highway on Maui (over 6 miles of native `aki`aki grass, stolonized with a hydro seeder for "instant" Native Hawaiian grass).

For years the green industry in Hawaii has grown alien lawn and turf grasses for golf courses, new subdivisions, and dust control with this "spray on grass technology".

We even grew in the grass for erosion control at Ho`omaluhia Botanic garden using hydro mulch with Australian carpet grass, but nobody, especially the Federal engineers knew that we could use native Hawaiian grasses as the key component.

* Chris Dacus who is a landscape architect and has been well supported by the DOT administration over the years including Scot Urada, Gary Choy and Highway Administor Glenn Yasui and Director Brennon T. Morioka.

* Chris has been at State of Hawaii DOT for 6 years as their landscape architect. He has worked with the system and we are seeing the results. It takes time, patience with the contract process, and strong willpower to reach the goals.

Its easy to stick a Hawaiian plant in the ground, we all want to make sure the landscape and trees last at least as long as the road surface (about 12 to 15 years industry standard)

In the wild or in home gardens, well planted parks with space, wide enough planting strips and soil with good drainage our trees and plants last for years and years. We arborists call Monkeypod trees "superman trees" Rainbow showers and kiawe are some other tough and pretty (but not native Hawaiian trees that are durable and pretty).

* Some of his outstanding projects are naupaka coconuts and grass along Ala Moana Blvd. one of the amazing design elements is the decorative street lights. These lights are a first decorative light for our state roads and they are great for their aesthetics and matching the context of the remainder of Waikiki street lights managed by the city. The plan is to extend this design theme all the way along to Aloha Tower Marketplace starting later this year.

Many say it's ugly for tourists coming into Waikiki to drive along Nimitz highway. This has been upgraded and is now maintained in a more akamai fashion.

** A big courageous project that is in the works is the Halawa interchange. This will be a showcase for native Hawaiian and xeriscape plants. Bunch grasses from dryland forests of Hawaii are being carefully grown now for the future.

The 5 grasses include: 'Aki'aki , Kawelu, 'Emoloa & Pili & the sedge 'Ahu'awa (Cyperus javanicus)


As humans its natural evolution that we like the green mowed golf course grass look. It's pretty and soothing on the eyes. BUT do you know what this costs us in Water, fertilizer and toxic pesticides, mowing and weed eating? That's why golfing is a rich mans hobby. The green mowed grass look is not natural for Hawaii or even much of America. It's an import from England with sheep grazing on the rich person's estate. So get over it folks!

Hawaiian bunch grasses are our future so that we can have clean water to drink and to grow our fresh and high value food crops. They are pretty and unique in our own Hawaiian way. Let's train our brains to love them and remember they won't need a weedwhackers buzzing your ears or dinging your automobile paintjob.