The Man Who Made This Garden

This lush valley falling toward Onomea Bay was once an impenetrable tangle, and it owes its rescue to a vacationer named Dan Lutkenhouse. In nineteen seventy-seven, while on vacation, Dan and his wife Pauline stumbled onto this seventeen acre parcel and fell for its wild seclusion. Where others saw a jungle choked with weeds, thorns, and invasive growth, Dan saw something worth saving forever.

He got to work. With cane knives, picks, shovels, and a chainsaw, he and one assistant cleared paths by hand until the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden opened to the public in nineteen eighty-four. Today it shelters roughly twenty five hundred species of plants, some so rare they survive almost nowhere else.

Before they passed, Dan and Pauline placed the land in a nonprofit so it would be preserved.