The 4th Quarter

Over the past five months I have been down here in the Keys, it has rained for a total of about ten hours, bringing only a couple of inches of rain.  I'd like to call up Lloró, Colombia, which receives about 43 FEET of rain per year and ask if they might kindly pass on one percent of that rain to the Keys during our dry season.  Spread that 5 inches of rain out over six months and we're golden.  43 feet is just an average amount of rainfall for that Colombian region, too.  A town close to Lloró called Tutunendo has received over 86 FEET of rain during its wettest year.  Tutunendo, that is eight stories worth of water falling on your gardens.  Share the wealth!  : P

It amazes me how many of the plants we have here at Kona Kai can do so well despite the severe lack of water during what is aptly called the "dry" season, the last part of which I like to call the "4th Quarter" for the plants, when they really have to give it their all to not only survive but look good as well.  We do irrigate the grounds to help them make it through, but not heavily.  As I discussed in my previous post, it is to our advantage to choose plants that have evolved to deal with annual drought periods.  For example, some plants, such as our pineapple plants (Ananas sp. - photo on left), along with many succulents, have an alternative way to photosynthesize (a plant's way of making food), which allows them to divide photosynthesis into two parts, one taking place at night and the other during the day; this is called CAM photosynthesis.  CAM plants can open their stomata (pores for gas exchange) at night to fix carbon dioxide and close them during the day, thereby significantly reducing water loss over the more common method of photosynthesis (C3 photosynthesis), which requires stomata to be open during the day.  Plants that use the C3 method can lose over 95% of the water they bring in through their roots to transpiration out of stomata, thereby giving CAM plants a big advantage in dry environments.  Elephant bush (Portulacaria afra - photo on right), of which we have two plants, can even switch between these types of photosynthesis depending on the conditions; now that's pretty smart!

Many bromeliads are also able to do without water for some time because of their water storage techniques.  Water is stored at the bases of their overlapping leaves and, in some species, in specialized "tanks" designed to hold water for use during dry periods (photo below on left).  Bromeliads also have microscopic structures covering their leaves called trichomes, which are cells designed to reflect sunlight, absorb moisture and limit moisture loss.  Trichome density varies from species to species and the presence of many trichomes results in the grayish color frequently seen on air plants (Tillandsia - photo below on right).

One of the ways in which succulents combat drought is by storing water within their leaves.  Below is a photo of a succulent, desert cabbage (Kalanchoe thyrsiflora), in our Gardens.  Many plants, including succulents, have root systems that are shallow rather than deep to rapidly absorb water after short periods of rainfall typical in drier climates/seasons.

Despite all these modifications, plants adapted to dry conditions can be pushed to their limits, but the plants here at Kona Kai are still doing very well considering the lack of rain.  Even though the grounds at Kona Kai are as great a place as any plant could wish to be, they still have to play hard, especially in this dry 4th quarter, if they want to stay on the team.  If you find yourself at the Resort near the end of the dry season, don't be surprised to be startled out of your hammock by what seems to be Bobby Knight on a motivational tirade (without the profanity of course): "Sweat it out!  Come on, this is the last stretch!  Finish line's in sight!  It's the fourth quarter, baby!  You're Eric Dickerson, not LeBron James...Mr. 4th Quarter, not 75 Cents!  You gotta keep goin' - rain's coming soon!  This is what you've been training for your whole life!  Now show these guests what kind of photosynthetically efficient, water-conserving, drought-tolerant monster you are!"  Pay no mind, it's just me - an impassioned botanical coach inspiring his team of plants to sweet summertime victory.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Picking Our Team

Remember trying out for a club or sports team and then waiting to find out to see if you made the team?  Well right now I feel like I'm on the other side as the coach, as I am figuring out which plants we want to select for inclusion in our Gardens when the opportunity presents itself.  Meanwhile, the plants no doubt wait in anxious anticipation of a decision.  Coaches have to be sure they select the best talent available but also a diversity of talent so that their team is strong in as many areas as possible.  Understandably, there's a pretty big group of plants vying for a spot on Kona Kai's team; it's tough to beat the beautiful waterfront views, quiet atmosphere, tropical temperatures and, of course,  the very best TLC from our grounds manager, Veronika.  Sadly, there will be many plants that will not make the cut - I can be extremely selective, choosing only the finest from the fields, nursery fields, that is.

My first criterion for selection is: the plant needs to be able to not only tolerate, but do well in our climate and environment with minimal care.  Secondly, the plant needs to be ethnobotanically interesting.  If a plant meets both of those criteria, it goes on a list.  From this list, Florida natives, especially those that are endangered, get priority in my book.  This is because planting natives makes sense in terms of having plants that are best-adapted to our environment and giving visitors as much of a Florida Keys experience as possible, while also enhancing native wildlife value in our collections by providing flowers for native pollinators and fruits for native birds and other wildlife.  Selecting endangered species helps in ex-situ conservation (conservation outside of natural habitat) of these plants.  There are, however, very interesting plants native to other regions of the world that do well in our climate, and I won't exclude them simply because they are not Keys natives.  To get to the next stage of selection, it also doesn't hurt to have attractive features, such as flowers or fruits.

After the plants are all given priority based on the above criteria, I then ask:  What are the most ethnobotanically interesting plants?  What niches, both ethnobotanical and horticultural, do we already have filled and which do we want to fill?  Which plant will work best in a site we have open, given the soil type, amount of exposure to sunlight, etc.?  A few plants will likely remain as good candidates for a specific opening after all criteria have been considered and questions asked.  A decision is then made by Joe, Veronika and I as to which plant we select, after which we hold an official "Kona Kai Draft" event, welcome the chosen plants to the stage with much cheering and applause from the audience, then outfit them with Kona Kai hats and jerseys while a veritable fireworks display issues forth from the flash bulbs of the multitudinous press.  Now you're probably thinking, "Wow!  Ethnobotany sure is underrated...I had no idea it was so exciting and glamourous!" and you're absolutely right.

I'll leave you with a couple photos of our latest superstar, a fine specimen of Jacquinia keyensis (joewood), which is a small native tree that has been planted by our waterfront.  It has beautiful flowers and its poisonous fruits have been added to bodies of water by indigenous peoples to catch fish.

Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Say Cheese!!

Or...if you're staying with us here at Kona Kai, "Say Keys!!" works even better and no doubt makes your smile a little bigger and brighter with the reminder that you are really, truly, actually here, in our little slice of paradise.

Photographic documentation of plant collections is a very nice asset for a botanic garden.  These pictures not only serve as memories, but as horticultural and botanical resources as well, providing a visual history of the gardens and documentation of their development.  For specific plants, along with inventory (taking measurements of the plants and evaluating their condition), photographs allow others to see exactly what the evaluator saw and make their own observations and judgments of the condition of a plant.  In addition, notes like, "serrated leaves, small red flowers and oblong purple fruit" don't provide too much detail, so pictures provide a great supplement to descriptions, especially when one does not know all the correct botanical terminology to adequately and accurately describe the plant.  Below is an example of flowers from Phoenix roebelenii (pygmy date palm) that might be hard to adequately describe:

Pictures are also useful when it comes to diseases, pests, or nutrient deficiency.  If one does not have an extensive knowledge of these subjects, it is difficult to make guesses during inventory as to what might be wrong with a plant.  It's not very helpful to have generic notes that say, "yellow spots on leaves" or "some type of bug infestation."  Pictures are useful in that they provide a ready reference for follow-up in the office with either print or electronic resources to help determine exactly what the condition is and the appropriate remedial action to take.  Here's an example of a condition on a frond of Thrinax morrisii (Key thatch palm) that might be difficult to accurately guess the cause of and/or describe in words:

Another benefit of photographic documentation is convenience.  Perhaps you need to double-check the identity of one of your plants but it only flowers/fruits once a year for a short period of time.  If you know which parts of the plant are important to photograph and what notes to take along with them (i.e. notes on dimensions, flower and fruit characteristics, etc.), you can evaluate the identity of a plant from the office at any time of the year.  This is especially helpful, too, since many plants cannot be found with both flowers and mature fruit available to analyze at the same time.  I was lucky enough to catch some of our female Zamia integrifolia (coontie) coning:

Photographs can be used to track the growth of individual plants when taken at regular intervals, depending upon the growth rate of the plant.  It's almost like having a collection of pictures of yourself from when you were a baby all the way to your current age.  These pictures are a nice supplement to measurements taken during inventory.  Having only your height and weight each year of your life certainly leaves out a lot of details that pictures are able to capture, and I feel the same way about plants; height, canopy spread and diameter measurements only paint a very generic picture of a given plant.  We've begun tracking the growth of shoots of our breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) with photographs after it died back to the ground during a cold snap this past winter:

It is imperative that an organized cataloguing system is developed for the plant pictures.  BG-Base helps us with this by providing a way for pictures to be associated with specific records in the Gardens' database.  I also make sure that each picture is labeled with the date it was taken, scientific name of the plant and its accession number.  Without knowing this information, the pictures lose value.  It would be much like having an art gallery with little or nothing known for certain about each work.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Often words are not sufficient to adequately describe everything of note about a plant and it is more helpful, efficient and accurate to take pictures in addition to describing and measuring the plant.  A well-documented and organized collection of photographs provides an important objective perspective of the collections and also make our records more interesting and valuable.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Socializing At Kona Kai Now More Formal, Informative And Interesting

I don't know about you, but when I am in attendance at an event where I know almost no one, it helps if each person has a name tag with not only their name, but also where they are from and perhaps one other line with something like their profession.  This is nice because it eliminates having to ask the same questions at every introduction, which gets old quick.  Name tags would also become even more helpful if everyone you were meeting couldn't communicate with you at all; indeed, it would be essential to have a tag or someone to introduce you to learn anything about them.  Plants are like this.  You meet a plant you don't know, so you very politely introduce yourself, then to break the awkward silence in which you vainly expected some response, you proceed to tell it all about yourself, without so much as a hint of reciprocal sharing from the plant, which apparently has no idea of proper social protocol.  Admittedly, even I, as a botanist, have difficulty in getting plants to respond to questions I might have for them.  So, in an effort to ameliorate interaction with our silent photosynthetic friends, we have conducted research on about 50 of the plants on the grounds and produced display labels with interesting information about each plant.

Initially, Joe, Ronnie, and I worked to develop ideas for suitable label formats and categories of information to display on each label.   We decided on multiple label sizes depending upon how much information we have and want to display for a given plant.  After developing a preliminary list of plants we thought might be good candidates to receive a label, I set about researching each plant to verify information we already have, finding information we lacked, as well as hopefully discovering plenty of other interesting facts along the way.  The first step in this process is finding quality, reliable sources for information about each plant, which is always a challenge initially but once you know where to look and who you can trust, research becomes easier.

After the information was obtained and organized, Ronnie worked to develop beautiful templates for our labels, which we then ordered and have now placed throughout the grounds.  So although the plants stubbornly maintain their vow of silence, we've worked to provide you with a bit of an informative introduction to each plant on our display labels.  If you find yourself wanting to know more about them, you can talk to the front desk about a tour with yours truly and I'd be happy to show you around and give you a more in-depth introduction to the plants in our collections.  Below is an example of our larger ethnobotanical label and smaller simple display label for plants currently without significant documented ethnobotanical information:

Rick Hederstrom

Associate Director

P.S.  You can also follow this blog on Twitter at twitter.com/kkgardens.

Spring Plant Sale at Fairchild

As places in the garden landscape here at Kona Kai open up due to either a plant's death or removal, it is good to have an idea as to what one would like to plant when an opening becomes available.  On the other hand, sometimes you come across a plant that you simply must have, so you make space for it.  Either way, attending good plant sales or visiting quality nurseries are good ways to scope out new plants.  Last weekend, I had the privilege of venturing up to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden for their annual Spring Plant Sale to see what they were offering and also tour the grounds themselves. 

Conducting research both before a visit to a plant sale or nursery is advisable.  Researching before your visit can help you determine what is actually for sale and what will fit your needs/wants best.  For example, as Kona Kai's focus is on plants with ethnobotanical interest, I checked out Fairchild's plant sale offerings listed on their website and studied to find out which plants, if any, were of ethnobotanical interest.  Research is also advisable, especially when working for a botanic institution, because many times we are trying to acquire a specific plant and we want to make sure what is being offered is truly that specific plant.  Most nursery employees are not taxonomists and their plant identification can be incorrect or often not specific enough; plants may only be listed by a general common name.  For instance, a nursery may call a plant "thatch palm," but that name can be applied to numerous species and even genera of plants.  When it comes to botanic gardens and arboreta, even the best will have plants identified incorrectly, so even though I can have confidence that Fairchild probably has the plants they are selling ID'd correctly, it never hurts to double-check to make sure the plant you are looking to buy matches the description of the plant you want, especially if it is a rare plant or one that will be very important for your collection.

Fairchild BG is in Coral Gables on Old Cutler Road, which is a real treat to drive from the south, with plenty of sections lined with mature trees and beautiful properties.  This was my first visit to Fairchild and throughout the day, I enjoyed reading the display or record labels on plants that caught my eye - there were many excellent specimens to see.  Upon entering the Garden, I was greeted by live music well-suited to the event and setting.  A very good variety of food stands from local vendors was to be found on the Garden House Lawn, while the plant sale took place in the Palmetum.  Fairchild offered an impressive selection of plants, although you have to arrive early if you want to get your hands on the most sought-after offerings; even arriving an hour after opening was too late for some plants.  The number of vendors allowed to showcase plants at the event was not very large, but it was ok because I think that Fairchild's plants are the real highlight, given their reliability in naming and also the potential to find plants with unique histories, such as a palm grown from a seed that came from a palm David Fairchild collected in the wild, brought back and planted on the grounds.  It is always ideal to have provenance (a plant's origin and propagation history) information for plants in a botanical collection, and this is more likely to be available with plants that have been propagated at a botanic institution, although I have also come across nurseries that keep records of this and place higher value on plants with interesting, traceable provenance.

During the day, I fortuitously ran into Dr. Carl Lewis, Fairchild's Director, and we spent some time walking the grounds, talking plants, and also talking Connecticut College, since he is also an alum from the Botany department!  I was very excited to learn this since the College graduates only about 350 students per year, with only a handful of students from the small but very well-staffed Botany department.

Since our need for new plants was not great and I did not find any plants with significant ethnobotanical interest that we did not already have, I did not make any purchases, although I can see how bringing a credit card to one of these events could be quite dangerous; I think the expression "gardener at a Fairchild plant sale" makes a great alternative to "kid in a candy store."  This expression could also turn out to be of great value for anyone trying to creatively, wittily and effectively describe kids in candy stores, which has always been a conundrum for those unfortunate souls who begin a sentence with "These kids in the candy store are like..." leading to either an awkward silence or an attempted analogy that precipitates the former.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

In The Keys, No Showers Needed To Bring Spring Flowers

It is said in the Keys that fall is spring and spring is fall.  Trees such as the mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) and gumbo-limbo (Bursera simaruba) are dropping their leaves now, not due to cold temperatures, but a seasonal lack of rainfall during the winter/spring months, which has been especially lacking this year (I believe it has only rained thrice in the past three months I have been down here).  Dropping leaves limits a plant's water loss because transpiration occurs primarily through stomata in the leaves.  However, no small number of plants are always to be found in bloom in the Gardens here at Kona Kai, even while the mahogany and gumbo-limbo are shedding their leaves to limit water loss.  It's much different from up north in temperate regions, where seasons are more delimited, most plants do not flower in fall and the dead of winter, and the majority of plants in the landscape lose their leaves for almost half the year; I'm still trying to figure things out down here with regards to flowering/fruiting/leaf-drop patterns.

If you have ever been to the Keys, you might understand that the phrase "dead of winter" doesn't exactly apply here and that flowering in the winter months can occur in a number of plants, despite the fact that there is a shortage of water during this time.  It seems as though there has been an increase in the number of plants in bloom around the property in the past few weeks, likely in anticipation of the rains which usually fall with greater frequency in the summer and fall months.  If plants complete their flowering in the next couple months, then they will begin developing fruit, a process requiring elevated amounts of water, in months when rain is more plentiful.  Many plants on the property also come from other regions of the world and when plants are moved from their home ranges to different latitudes, their original flowering/fruiting patterns do not change dramatically, so some of the plants in bloom now might be used to flowering in the spring months in their native range, even though this time might not be an ideal time for flowering in the Keys.

Photo on left - Plumeria alba (frangipani), photo on right - Strelitzia reginae (bird-of-paradise).

I recently traversed the Gardens armed with a point-and-shoot digital camera to document some of the springtime beauty at Kona Kai.  From the pictures taken (some of which are included in this post for those who do not have Facebook), Gardens Director/Owner Joe Harris put together a photo album for Facebook in celebration of spring, which you can check out by following this link: Spring Flowers at Kona Kai.  I was new to the camera and as many of you may know, the auto-focus feature on many point-and-shoot cameras is by no means perfect.  It seems like every time I want to take a picture of something, the camera finds a way to focus on anything but the subject of the photo, seeming to think that I can't possibly want to take a picture of the beautiful flowers dominating most of the screen, and that I must certainly mean to focus on obscure objects far in the distance.  So, instead of an excellent, sharply-focused close-up picture of an orchid flower, I find that I have a picture that looks like an orchid flower jumped in front of the lens at the last minute like an obnoxious child ruining a photo just as I was snapping a picture of a piece of potting soil in the distance.  For his own reasons, Joe chose to include some of my out-of-focus masterpieces in the album, which doesn't bode too well for upholding my Ansel-Adams-level reputation as a photographer, but perhaps it will start a new movement in photography, starting with my own first exhibit, which I'll call something like "Flowers Through The Eyes of Great-grandparents Sans Spectacles."

Photo on left - inflorescence of an unidentified bromeliad, photo on right - Bougainvillea spectabilis (paper-flower).


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Time For A Haircut

'Tis the season for the first of our biannual (twice a year) pruning and maintenance of the trees here at Kona Kai.  The Gardens were considerately abuzz with activity over the past couple days as our trusty Florida Keys Tree Services crew consisting of Bernie, P.J. and Stevie was been brought in to clear out dying/dangerous limbs, coconuts, old palm fronds and tree stumps, with much help from Veronika as well.

It is important for us to keep on top of pruning for a number of reasons, and some of these reasons apply more to sub-tropical / tropical environments than temperate ones.  For example, as palm fronds die on certain palms, such as fan palms (Washingtonia spp.), fronds hold on to the tree and form a sort of skirt around the top of tree below the living fronds.  As fronds are cut from palms, the bases of many need to be left because they are still mostly attached to the trunk.  Over time, these frond bases loosen and can be pulled off.  If regular maintenance is not done to remove dead fronds and their bases, these areas can become nesting areas for insects as well as small animals such as squirrels and rats, which is not very desirable, especially at a resort.  In the picture on the left, you can see the nifty apparatus (actually made by Niftylift in England) Bernie and his crew use to get up into the tree canopies.  It is quite an amazing machine that can even navigate tight sidewalks, a big advantage over bucket trucks.  The photo on the right shows P.J. attaching a rope around a heavy coconut bunch so that when cut, it doesn't crash to the ground, destroy plants and cause general flying-coconut mayhem.

Hurricanes are another reason for regular pruning.  If we don’t remove as many of the coconuts, weak trees, weak limbs and dead palm fronds as possible, they can become dangerous debris during a hurricane.  You can imagine the damage a five-pound coconuts would cause at over 100 mph.  Even without wind, coconuts will fall, and the last thing we want is for one of our guests to be the first to test out how well an iPad holds up after it is introduced to a coconut falling from a 30-foot tree.  It is also good to prune back tall trees or trees with limbs overhanging our buildings, as these branches also become potentially very dangerous to structures during hurricanes.

As you can see in the pictures below, we have taken out the rest of the Schefflera completely because it was weak, rotting and would likely have fallen soon (see pics from previous entry).  Bernie brought in a stump grinder so that we could remove the stump, fill in the area and decide what we want to plant there in the future.  Stump grinders are pretty powerful and helpful machines; they make quick work of a stump that would take much longer to rot away or remove by hand and allows for immediate re-planting of an area.  A potentially amazing alternative use for this machine would be as a giant margarita blender; I'll look into it.

While they were here, we also had the crew cut down what remained of the Altocarpus altilis (breadfruit tree) in our fruit garden, which died back nearly to the ground in a cold snap last year.  Although shoots were coming out of the stump, we agreed it would be best to take it out and leave a few shoots that had come up from the roots a few feet away from the trunk.  As you can see from the picture on the right, the stump had a low "V" crotch and was rotting away at the top.  Later on, we will select one of the nearby shoots to hopefully grow into a strong tree.

We make the best efforts to keep the grounds as pristine as possible throughout the pruning/trimming process, and at the end of two days of trimming, there is almost no trace of the work, which was incredible for me to witness because of the amount of plants that we worked on.  Much credit goes to Veronika, the tree service crew and the rest of our dedicated staff who helped make this Spring's trimming a great success.

Rick Hederstrom

Associate Director