Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm

Foreword by William S. Merwin

xi Foreword WILLIAM S. MERWIN Some of the readers of Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm will probably be professional botanists, and for that reason I feel that I should begin with a disclaimer. I am not a scientist of any kind but a writer and amateur gardener. My relation to Pritchardias and to other forms of life has grown out of the pleasure they have given to me rather than from purely intellectual curiosity. From childhood on, I have tried to make gardens, even when I did not know the names of what I was cultivating. The individual species, after all, have only the names that we have assigned to them. They evolved perfectly well without our designations for millennia before we came along to sort them out for reasons of our own. But I approach the subject as an amateur, and upon invitation, I was asked to write a prefatory word to the present summary, and I accept the invitation as an honor and as a way of thanking Professor Hodel for his kindness and generosity and for his meticulous contributions to our present knowledge of palm botany, of which I have made practical use for some years. But I do not pretend to professional authority, and Professor Hodel is entirely innocent of any errata of mine. When I look up from the table every morning that I have the good fortune to be at home on Maui, I see outside the window the early daylight reflected by all the subtle greens and gray-greens of a broadleaf palm. The huge, pleated, fan-shaped fronds spread out to fringes of long, slender, pointed ribbons, and their shapes keep waving shadows across the leaves under them. I acquired that palm, and seven or eight of its siblings, almost twenty-five years ago. It was two or three years old then, in a three-gallon pot, in the Hawaiian indigenous plant nursery that had been started by a friend and neighbor of mine. I was interested in palms, and especially in Pritchardias. He told me that these palms were Pritchardia gaudichaudii. The seeds had been collected by a young palm enthusiast from the top of a rock island like the one shown on the front cover of the edition of Professor Hodel’s Review of the Genus Pritchardia, which was published as a supplement by the International Palm Society (vol. 51, December 2007). The name of this species, as I would learn, has been clouded with confusion since Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré first examined a specimen. The palms of this group that I acquired from my friend do not fit the later and more detailed botanical description by Odoardo Beccari, published in 1921 by the Bishop Museum, and they do not fit other suggestions either. And so, for my admiration and gratitude to this palm every morning, I have little more certainty than the tree itself does about its name. Foreword by William S. Merwin xii We know that a few species of this genus are indigenous to other parts of the Pacific. Several of them evolved on different islands of Fiji and, I believe, Tonga, the Tuamotus, and the Cook Islands, but by far the greatest number of them are Hawaiian, and all native Hawaiian palms are Pritchardias. Some botanists have expressed disappointment at the fact that in Hawaiian all the native palms are referred to simply as loulu. That was the name for a palm in Hawaiian. If Hawaiians needed to discriminate among them, they could easily have used local place names to indicate the variations that we have come to use as distinctions of separate species. There may have been such designations in Hawaiian, but if so they were lost. When I first came to Hawai‘i in the 1960s and asked the name of one very beautiful palm, of a kind that I had never seen before, I was told that it was a loulu, and that nugget of information remained as a kind of talisman from my first glimpse of the Islands, long before I returned and came to think of them as home. The prospect of being able to garden all year round was part of my eventual decision to settle here. Once here, I was drawn to see and learn what I could about the indigenous Hawaiian forest and flora, in different parts of the islands, and that interest came to focus on the native palms. As soon as I had a place on which to...