“Grasses are invasive here,” my Kānaka Maoli agroforestry collaborator told me earlier this year. The statement seemed odd to me then, as I thought about the numerous homes with “nice” lawns, the many picturesque ranches across the islands dominated by different grasses, and the resorts and estates considered by many to be “luxurious” in part due to their expansive fields of neatly manicured grass.
The term “invasive” is political and contentious—depending on one’s goals, intentions, and point of view.
But I began to understand what my collaborator meant by his statement when he took us up Kohala Mountain to see how the many native trees, ferns, and other plants we’d been working with behaved and thrived together in mature communities.
With permitted access into Parker Ranch—one of the largest cattle ranches in all of the “United States” and the fourth or fifth largest landowner in Hawaiʻi, holding over 100,000 acres—we drove through its seemingly endless rolling hills of pasture, eventually meeting its fenceline that bordered a protected forest reserve. The contrast on either side of that fence was stark. On the side that we came from stood an un-arbored landscape blanketed by vast fields of grass, sparsely speckled with the remnants of long-decayed trees. The side that we climbed into was a densely canopied wet forest. Even from afar, one can see this distinct boundary—a broad, solid band of light green makes up the base of the mountain with a sudden transition into dark green beyond the linear and angled perimeters of the cattle fencing.
As we bushwhacked our way in deeper, I felt like we were entering an entirely different world.
In contrast to the heat from the open pastures behind us exposed to direct sun, it was cool under the tall canopy of the dominant ʻŌhiʻa lehua trees—which make up 80% of Hawaiʻi’s native forests. They are known to be vital to watersheds across the islands: “ʻŌhiʻa grows naturally with all kinds of mosses, ferns, and keiki (young) plants all over its branches. They are like a big fishnet, capturing tiny mist droplets that slowly seep down into our aquifers,” writes Heidi Bornhorst.
Blair Langston of Pilina ʻĀina shares that “Ohi” in Hawaiian means “to collect”—with ʻŌhiʻa in part named so to refer to their role as water collectors. These trees have certain morphological characteristics that make them up to 50% more effective at drawing in water when compared to other non-Hawaiian tree species. Langston also emphasizes the saying, “Hahai no ka ua i ka ulu lāʻau,” which translates to “The rain follows after the forest.”
“Development”—of relationships
In front of me, I felt the conversations I’d shared with various people on Green Dreamer (including Christine Winter, Andreas Weber, and Eben Kirksey) about the illusion of a neatly bounded individual self come to life. Indeed, there was no clear concept of separation—with plants growing on top of each other, the roots of one joined with those of another, the seemingly boundless moss Sphagnum palustre who has cloned themselves for 50,000 years carpeting the floor and stretching upwards, becoming the skin of trees and a moist growing medium for new seedlings.
While the forest was lush, however, I remember mentioning that it felt very “clean”—though that wasn’t the right descriptor for what I meant. I later realized this was precisely because of the absence of two-plus feet tall grasses that would have made it difficult to see the ground. Instead, the forest floor consisted of flattened layers of leaf litter and shallow mats of mosses. As Rhett A. Butler writes: “The forest floor of primary tropical rainforest is rarely the thick, tangled jungle of movies and adventure stories… Instead of choking vegetation, a visitor will find large tree trunks, interspersed hanging vines and lianas, and countless seedlings and saplings and a relatively small number of ground plants.”
The whole intergenerational community showcased time as continually folding back into itself. Younger trees grew right at the base of their senior relatives as if encouraged to focus their early years on rooting themselves downwards to establish their networks of relationships. All the while, the filtered canopy from the elders humbled their upward growth. This is what German foresters such as Peter Wohlleben of The Hidden Life of Trees call “education by shade”: speaking to how slow growth under the canopy of Mother Trees promotes stronger foundations and resilience against sickness and environmental threats.
While there are some pioneering or non-forest trees that thrive in solitude, I think about Wohlleben naming the uniformly grown trees that line streets as “street children”—left to navigate the world on their own without guidance from wiser generations nor relational support from access into well-established mycelial networks underground.
Walking deeper into the forest made me question dominant landscaping aesthetics and formulaic protocols of planting small trees ten feet apart and larger trees thirty to fifty feet apart. I assume these suggestions are based on how wide and tall the trees potentially might grow—what is visible to the human eye. But what about the complex relationships immeasurable by our tools that different generations of plants, fungi, mosses, and microorganisms can benefit from having opportunities to develop?
Along the veins of my piece “Reorienting Growth,” I would be curious to reorient the dominant interpretation of “development” being “the process of converting land to a new purpose by constructing buildings or making use of its resources,” according to Oxford Languages.
What if we focused “development” on enhancing and advancing the land’s own place-based intimacies?
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