It is February at last and right on cue a seed catalog has appeared in my mailbox at school. It is filled with color and possibilities. It sits on my desk suggesting that if would be much more fun to imagine spring gardens and ponder which seeds to start now for our planter boxes rather than to do the dull grading that has piled up on the other side of the desk.
This is the time of year that always seems so full of promise….nothing much is showing yet outside yet – but you can just feel that things are going to start popping into bloom very soon.
This week I also came across a wonderful NPR story about a library in Colorado that is getting everyone ready for spring and finding a new role for public libraries in the community as well-the story explains how it works - if you have a library card you can also check out a packet of seeds! And then you grow the plants from your packet and harvest the seeds from the best of the vegetables or fruits that you grow in the summer and return those to the library so that other people can check them out and plant them the next year.
The director of the library says "while a library may seem like an odd location for a project like this, seeds and plants should be open to everyone. That makes a public library the perfect home for a seed collection. The American Library Association says there are at least a dozen similar programs throughout the country."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/02/170846948/how-to-save-a-public-library-make-it-a-seed-bank
All this reminded me of the projects we did in the public schools in West Hawaii, on the island of Hawaii to try to collect and grow the seeds of some of the most endangered Hawaiian plants. We collected a number of seeds from endangered plants and then grew them in our school garden. Some, such as the wiliwili tree seeds we kept growing for a couple of years in pots to protect them from the invasive introduced gall wasps.
Here is a short movie that we made with Mrs. Pinnow's class at Waikoloa Elementary School about one of our seed projects. We made this movie about 8 years ago!
The native Hawaiian dry land forest is one of the most endangered habitats on the plant because it exists exactly in the same location as most of the resort development. The land is so valuable for development that most of it was developed before there was enough protest at the destruction of the native forest to result in any reserves or protected areas. The dryland forest plants are also vulnerable to fire and the trees are easily damaged or destroyed by introduced species such as rats and goats that are now found all through out the islands. There are so many different and unique dry land forest trees and plants such as the wiliwili, the mamane and the uhiuhi that could disappear in our life time if people don't act quickly to save seeds and to re-plant more trees.
When we moved from the island five years ago we donated the wiliwili trees to the Waikoloa Dryland Forest Initiative as they were hoping to be able to start to re-plant native trees back into an area that had been set aside. In thinking about all this again I did a quick search and found their website and was so happy to read their most recent post from January 2013….
"Help us get started on our 2013 planting at Waikoloa Dry Forest! On Saturday January 19th we will be planting native trees and shrubs in a brand new site. This year we have big plans to plant four acres with over 1200 plants! We are very excited to open up new weed free zones and re-plant our native dry forest species. On the 19th we will be planting ‘ohe makai, wiliwili, ‘a ‘ali‘i, ‘akia and more."
Fortunately, there are many dedicated folks working hard to conserve biodiversity of the dryland forest and to save all these and many more endemic plants - here are some more links to some of the other native plant projects on the island of Hawaii ….
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