A Choice

Humans are the main transformative force on the planet at the time; we can make of it what we wish to a large extent. If we wanted a world full of a diversity of life, we could make that a priority and bring that about. If we wanted a world largely denuded of life, we could bring that about, too. For those who do not consider morality to be objective, there is no right or wrong, only what a given culture at a given time in history deems, usually by majority, to be better or worse; one way could not be considered "wrong" and the other way "right," they would just be two ways to live with different priorities.

Two very different potential futures for our planet.

Earth as a planet racing through space doesn't have the capacity to care which way we choose; it doesn't need us to "save" it because it has and will continue to go through cycles of more life and less life, indifferently continuing in its orbit until it is eventually engulfed in a dying sun. Besides humans, other species of life on the earth don't have (as far as we know) the capacity on an individual level to consciously care if there is more or less diversity or life; they are driven by instinct and completely preoccupied with survival (food, reproduction) and reactions to immediate stimuli. As humans we are uniquely able to learn what the earth was like in the past and care about what the world will be like in the future. We have the capacity to consider the earth from a global perspective and understand the factors that contribute to more life or less, as well as the power to take conscious actions to bring about planned outcomes based on what kind of future we choose for the planet.

"The Thinker" by Auguste Rodin (Taken by dalbera on Flickr)

There are plenty of people out there who aren't interested in plants (yet) and who apparently don't care much about the natural environment or its future (yet). I can still remember when one of my friends in college said he never really liked being outdoors and how much of a shock that was to me. Unlike my friend, I love spending time in natural spaces like gardens and parks, which I see as havens and retreats, but there are plenty of others who would rather use that space to develop houses, factories, shops, and expansive lawns. If a "silent spring" were indeed to happen, with all birds vanishing, I think there would be quite a few people who wouldn't notice or care. Perhaps they'd remark one day that they hadn't seen or heard a bird in a while, then just shrug their shoulders and carry on.

Our children would then see a world without birds as the norm, with stories of a world filled with thousands of kinds of colorful winged singing creatures seeming much like how stories of the dinosaurs are to us. The same could be said for plants. Even if the world were nearly completely void of plants, something akin to Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine, and everything humans need is synthesized, those born into that world wouldn't miss plants because they never knew them. Perhaps there would not even be an interest in having them around at all - there would be much more interest in the technological advances that have been made. If anyone did happen to be interested in plants, there would be plenty of maintenance-free artificial trees, shrubs, flowering plants, and grasses for people to have installed. Nature would be regarded as primitive, dangerous, and chaotic; something not to be desired back. Besides, if people ever wanted to immerse themselves in "nature," they'd have virtual reality experiences available to simulate activities such as hiking or mountain biking through any type of landscape, and that would be considered close enough to, or perhaps even better than, the real thing. It's not too absurd to think the world could become a nature-less technologically advanced dystopia similar to what some authors and film makers imagine...

From 'Equilibrium'.

From Spielberg's 'A.I.'

Machine City from 'The Matrix'.

Although I studied ethnobotany in the strict sense of the term in college and appreciate greatly the benefits plants provide people, I think a rationale for protecting and conserving nature based completely on utilitarian arguments is imperfect. For one, I think that, largely thanks to the building blocks plants have given us, we will be able to synthesize all that we need without their help (we're already synthesizing beef in laboratories!). Secondly, there are a lot of creatures out there that have no direct use for us, and so are "expendable" using utilitarian logic. Acknowledging those two points, I think the ultimate rationale for protecting and conserving nature is beauty. Even if miniature seahorses and orchids provide me with nothing tangibly useful in my life, I still want very much to have them around for many generations to come so that others could marvel at their beauty as I have, and these creatures could continue to function in ecosystems, which I also consider to be beautiful because of their complexity and function.

Negligible utilitarian value for humans, priceless beauty and ecological value.

As another example, why would it be tragic if all Bach compositions (or those of your favorite music producer) and all their renditions were destroyed? After all, everyone born henceforth would never know them and so they wouldn't miss them. However, those who had been alive to experience them would find it tragic that there would be people who would never be able to experience the unique, powerful, and emotional beauty of that music, and would consider the world has suffered a great loss, not because the music had been useful in a utilitarian sense but because it had been beautiful.

Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Cello Suite No.1 Prelude

While I certainly want you to learn how plants have been and continue to be useful to us as humans, and so come to a greater appreciation for them, I want much more to spark curiosity and wonder in your mind and spirit for the incredible incarnations of life on earth, of which plants are a large part. I want to help you hone your senses of observation to see all the little and big miracles that surround us until you are constantly going around with "oh wow! oh wow!" in your mind and realize that the value of each living creature is not based principally in what products it could offer for our use, but in its own magnificent and beautiful nature that would be tragic if the world were without. Then when you understand that each of these creatures needs healthy ecosystems to survive and thrive, you'll wonder what you can do to ensure the health of those ecosystems (a subject for another post), and so ensure a life-filled planet for generations to come.

Such a future can become a reality if we choose it. I personally would rather have a world filled with as many miraculously beautiful incarnations of life as possible, even if that requires what at first seem like sacrifices on my part. If we made the choice to exploit the natural world to the point of denudation so that we could have more money and more "things," how ironic would it be if we'd give all that money and those possessions to once more live amongst the beauty that was sacrificed in the name of what was mistakenly valued as profit and thought to be progress. May we ever more fully know the priceless, irreplaceable beauty that surrounds us and live diligently to protect and nurture it.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Nothing Gold Can Stay

"Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay."

I often think of this poem by Robert Frost when walking around the Gardens. Everywhere there is life and beauty because the Gardens are very well kept by our staff. It is interesting to note that for a garden to be "well kept" it is almost a requirement that what is decaying or dead be removed or at least hidden. And yet, even in the best-kept gardens, there is no lack of death and decay, and cracks can be found in the facade of beauty if only one looks for them, which not many care to do. Why is it that our culture's sense of aesthetics largely excludes death and decay from what is considered "beautiful"? Perhaps it's because these sights serve as uncomfortable reminders that "nothing gold can stay."

Although I do love landscapes and gardens filled with only blooms and life, it seems like something of a lie: death doesn't really exist - the world is perpetually in a state of youthful beauty and vigor. When we look at a flower in full bloom, we are enraptured by it and our spirits soar, and may even be filled with a deep longing. Perhaps there is an unconscious reason why we love to surround ourselves with flowers in bloom - that we might convince ourselves that our life will also be only bloom, with no decay or death; that these things don't really exist.

Yet these very flowers serve as one of the most poignant examples of the transitoriness of every living thing on earth precisely because their extreme beauty gives way to almost unthinkable ugliness in such a short span of time. We would, of course, love to believe that flowers only go from bud to bloom and then bloom in perpetuity. Notice how flower bouquets are usually discarded as soon as the decay begins; we don't want to see that. I doubt most people have ever even intently looked upon a flower that has fully died!

For those who are willing to look these phenomena of decay and death straight in the eye, the hibiscus provides great opportunities for reflection. One can watch the buds develop as their beautiful colors flush into the exposed petals, which then open into full bloom for only a single glorious day. Afterwards, the flowers quickly and quietly fade and do not remain long on the plant, falling off to make way for tomorrow's beauties, which easily make you forget about the ones that came before - you will not bother looking for them underneath the leaves, where they are decaying upon the ground; a forgotten, contorted shadow of yesterday's magnificent beauty. Here is a sequence of photographs chronicling the typical life of a hibiscus flower over the course of about a week:

But if we do decide to push back the leaves of the hibiscus bushes to find the unsightly figures of yesterday's beauty, undoubtedly we will feel a corresponding tinge of revulsion perceptible within ourselves, as if our mind can't stand to face the truth of what such beauty has become, and what we ourselves will one day soon become. Indeed, each of our physical bodies is a flower. Look in the media today - youth is glorified in the same way flowers are glorified in display gardens. But what happens to those youthful "flowers" once they've passed their prime? Our culture seems to do the same as a display gardener would - keep them away from sight so as not to upset our pleasant fantasy of being forever young and beautiful. We can, however, find these flowers of yesterday if we but seek them out, beyond the movie screens and magazines. Here are only a couple examples among countless others:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, 4-time Mr. Universe and 7-time Mr. Olympia.

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Ursula Andress, the original Bond girl in the first James Bond Movie - Dr. No.

Flowers teach us the way of natural physical life on earth - youth, beauty, and vigor give way to decay, ugliness, and death. Try as we might, we will all reach the same end; we will all "subside" like the flowers of spring or the leaves of autumn, as Frost observes. And yet, we find a strange principle within the human species that seems to suggest an exception to Frost's "golden" rule. While our bodies follow the same path as nature's flowers, the spirit that animates our bodies can actually become more beautiful with age until the day we die. What then is this that has the potential to proceed ever forward mockingly in the face of inevitable physical decay and death? Simply, it is love, and all the noble qualities contained therein. If we are fortunate enough, we may arrive to the point of death enlivened by this triumph of love, when our spirit can say with Paul of Tarsus "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

After our bodies die, what happens to the spirits that animate them cannot be proven for certain one way or another, but perhaps well-kept gardens full of life, vigor, and beautiful flowers are not, as postulated above, intuitively created and appreciated so much out of an unconscious attempt to remove anything hinting of our inevitable decay and death. Perhaps they come from the sprouting of a deeply-seeded knowledge and hope inside that decay and death are not meant to be our end, but rather a passage into a perpetual springtime, of which our well-kept gardens and our capacity for ever-growing love within ourselves in spite of physical decay are only signs.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Hidden Wonders Revealed

Ok, I've kept you waiting long enough - here are the full photos of the tiny previews from my previous post, along with the scientific and common names of each plant.  All the photos are of plants here in The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai Resort - enjoy!

The fruit of Annona squamosa (sugar apple), which is delicious!  In our tropical fruit garden.

Billbergia pyramidalis (bromeliad) inflorescence (flower stalk).

Flower of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 'Fifth Dimension' (hibiscus).

Fenestraria aurantiaca (window plant or baby toes) in our Aquascape Garden.

Leaves of Cryptanthus 'Black Mystic' (bromeliad).

Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm) infructescence (fruit stalk).

A hairy petal and succulent stems of Stapelia gigantea (African starfish flower).

Bromeliad inflorescence (flower stalk). The purple and white parts are the individual flower buds.

Pineapple (Ananas) top and ornamental pink fruit.

Codiaeum variegatum (garden croton) leaves in the afternoon sun.

Ravenala madagascariensis (traveler's tree) fruits. Lemurs, which can see blue exceptionally well, disperse the seeds.

Dypsis decaryi (triangle palm) fruits developing.

Cordyline fruticosa (ti plant) inflorescences and leaves.

Male cone of Encephalartos ferox (Zululand cycad).

The nectar-rich inflorescences of Schefflera actinophylla (umbrella plant).

Fronds emerge from the center of Platycerium angolense (elephant ear fern) in our tropical courtyard.

Syngonium podophyllum (arrowhead vine) in bloom as it climbs up a mahogany.

A Tillandsia (air plant) growing in an orchid's pot in our Orchid House.

Male cone of Zamia integrifolia (coontie).

The bloom of Strelitzia reginae (orange bird-of-paradise).

From these photos alone, you can get a good idea of the incredible beauty and diversity of plants. Beyond being beautiful, they are incredibly useful to humans and the world as a whole, their diversity providing a range of products and services we have come to depend on for our survival and well-being, often in ways we don't fully realize or appreciate. With conscientious stewardship on our part, plants provide us with both beauty and utility - when it comes to nature, we really can "eat our cake and keep it, too!"


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

Beauty Unseen - "Hidden Wonders" of the Gardens

The Botanic Gardens here at Kona Kai Resort certainly are beautiful. Beyond the readily perceivable "macroscopic" beauty of the landscape as a whole, however, lies a world of "microscopic" beauty that goes largely unseen by most guests and visitors unless one knows when and where to look. One of the reasons people enjoy taking a tour with me, beyond the fact that they learn an incredible amount about plants and their relationships with people, is the uncovering of hidden wonders of intricate detail and great beauty that they would not have otherwise found. Below, I have included cropped sections of photographs I have taken of some of these hidden wonders here at Kona Kai. If you have a guess as to what any of these might be, feel free to leave a comment!  I'll reveal the identities of the plants as well as the full photographs in my next blog post.

To see and learn more about these and many other "hidden wonders," be sure to take a tour the next time you stay here at Kona Kai or pass through the Keys!


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director