Food is Beautiful

The open space behind my road is all wild and tangled weeds-- a sloppy mass of non-native plants. But when you identify the individual plants, you realize that each species was introduced for a reason. Those miniature dry pea-pods shuddering on the indigo? Brought over for dyes. That stumpy white-barked tree with the lacy leaves? It's delicious in soups! Stir fry the ugly bittermelon on the vine, pickle the reeking noni-- useful and delicious plants are hidden in the landscape all around.

O Bon Festival and Dance

The big sugar plantations brought over thousands of Japanese field workers to Hawaii in the 19th century-- and they brought their Buddhist traditions with them. Today their great great grandchildren, like my own daughter, still remember and celebrate the dead during the sweet and sad summer Bon dance season. Bon dances mean carefully wrapped Aloha-print kimonos and elegantly coiffed hair, naked bulbs strung across open fields, pastel paper lanterns, tinny recorded music and Taiko drums and people dancing careful steps around and around, remember the passing years and their loved ones.

Landscape Notecards

A few months ago we spent 24 hours sitting on the beach. We got there at low tide with a strong undertow --the weedy black rocks shouldering out of the water. As it got dark and windy the moony waves approached the camp site-- threatening to inhale the campfire and the shivering sleepingbags next to it. By morning the surf was flat and silver and the beach was covered in mist. Then it poured: water crashing from the sky and we huddled miserable and salt-soaked under a tarp. Then hot: blue water, blue sky, white foam.

All in one day!

That's how I feel about the landscape in Hawaii: if you can hold your gaze still, steady your madly distracted eyes, you will see how fast things change. Living here I get to see the cyclic whirr of seasons the way I never could if I was passing through. These shots briefly freeze some of those swift changes.



Here are some landscape photos gleaned from our years on the Big Island and Kauai. These are attached to 4x6 blank notecards with envelopes, available in singles or sets.

Hawaiian Botanical Cards

I live on a little dirt lane bordering the Waita reservoir. Uncle Ronnie down the street has colonized the open space along the road with hundreds of fruits and flowers: bananas, papayas, lychee, longan, guava, peppers, squash, eggplant, noni-- also trumpet flowers, ti, ginger, plumeria, anthuriums...
This photo series is all from my garden or from Uncle's open-space plantings.
Check out KnottyHonu.etsy.com to order!



heliconia rostrata
heliconia psittacorum



And French Kiss Ginger!
I had to look this one up: it's a skyflower vine.






allamada cathartica-- golden trumpet