Hot Tropicals

These are heady days in the changing world of Maui flower farming.

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Fashions change. So do car styles and hit songs. But plants? They’ve all been discovered already, right? Not so, especially not in the realm of tropical cut flowers. New discoveries have Haiku grower David Brown hopping with excitement.

After twenty-five years developing his family’s wholesale nursery on Maui’s rural north shore—gradually converting twenty-three acres of depleted pineapple fields into a controlled riot of foliage—David feels he’s closing in on the goal: to grow such a diversity of floral types that he will have year-round production in a full palette of colors, all of them knockouts.

When we visited, he kept dashing back from the field, wielding yet another floral surprise, each one flaming or dangling from a stem as hefty as Gandalf’s walking stick. He produced a hairy brown heliconia called She Kong. Then a solid-green specimen named Emerald Forest. The new Painter’s Palette goes through four color changes from bud to maturity. A deep-maroon costus known as Kiss of Death looked like a weapon whittled out of glass. The Ten-Day rostrata, a massive pendulous heliconia in candy hues, has made a big leap in cut-flower longevity over the previously popular Five-Day rostrata. Then David elicited gasps by brandishing a newly discovered torch ginger that’s pure white, the size of a softball, and formed of infolding porcelain-fine wavelike bracts. All these flowers and more were peaking in the middle of winter, typically a dormant time for any farm.

David’s excitement, his willingness to work nonstop—with the help of his parents, who broke ground for this nursery, Maui Tropicals & Foliage—all this energy must come together if they are to compete with floriculture worldwide. Maui is more expensive in every way than tropical regions in Asia, Africa, or South America.

And Maui’s a small fry, fewer than 300 acres in flower production, says Teena Rasmussen, who directs the county’s Office of Economic Development. “Floriculture is declining here because of tremendous pressure from the global market.” Orchid growers’ products have been swamped by a tide out of Thailand. “It’s horrible to lose any of our farms,” she says. “Flowers and Hawaii go together. We have the most vibrant colors on the planet, thanks to our sunlight and perfect growing conditions.” Teena should know. For three generations, her family’s Paradise Flower Farms has grown protea and other tropicals on the slopes of Haleakala.

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