The botanical garden at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has joined the world's largest plant conservation network.
The Botanic Gardens Conservation International has offered formal accreditation to UH Hilo's garden, which specializes in bromeliads, palms, and cycads, a type of cone-bearing plant.
The garden began with just a single tree planted by biology professor Don Hemmes in the 1980s.
During a lecture on the lifecycle of a pine tree, one of Hemmes' students raised her land and asked what a pine tree was.
"And she said, 'Well, the islands I come from, you know, we don't have pine trees,'" Hemmes recalled.
"So I went out and decided, I better plant a pine tree so I could show it to the students," he said. "And then it just, as I say, got out of control."
Now, the garden spans several acres on UH Hilo's campus and has been nurtured over the last four decades by Hemmes and his colleagues, as well as students and community volunteers.
Hemmes is particularly proud of the garden's collection of cycads, which contains specimens of over a third of the known species of cycads in the world.
He said the main purpose of the garden is still to give students the opportunity to interact with plants they may not otherwise have the chance to see.
"The students usually don't travel to these other countries to see these types of plants," he said. "It's one thing to see a picture of this plant in a book, but there's nothing like actually seeing the living plant."
Hemmes' first tree, a black pine, still stands in the garden today.
