About five years after the publication of A Native Hawaiian Garden, people began asking me when a second edition would appear. There were two reasons for my hesitation. The first was that with a book you can only make changes by publishing new edition after new edition – what do you do if there's really only a handful of things you want to change but that handful contains some REALLY important changes? The second reason for my hesitation was my lack of experience with many plants. My expertise is with coastal and dry lowland plants. (Hey, I've lived on the westside of O‘ahu for over twenty years!) And, while I've grown many native plants of Hawai‘i's mesic and wet forests, that experience is limited – too limited for me to feel comfortable sharing it with a large audience. So, what to do.

Well, I think this website is the solution. Much to my surprise, creating (and, most importantly, modifying) a website really isn't hard. So, it is here that I will share what I know and what I have learned since 1999, and what I continue to learn. To address my second hesitation, I intend to ask native plant horticulturists with expertise outside my own to contribute pages to this site. I hope, over time, this will become less and less my website and more and more a communal site of shared knowledge.

I hope you find the site useful. However, I ask you to be patient. So the site doesn't consume my life, I will be adding pages slowly. Perhaps, this will keep you coming back again and again. I hope so. Understand too there's still lots of useful information in A Native Hawaiian Garden that may never appear at this site. Therefore, I encourage you, if you haven't already, to borrow or buy a copy if you're anxious to get started with native Hawaiian plants. This recommendation does not stem from a desire to make an extra buck in royalties. (Believe me, you would laugh at the amount of my yearly royalty checks!) Rather, it stems from my desire to say thank you to the University of Hawai‘i Press (with your money) for taking a chance on John and me, two trained marine biologists who fell in love with Hawai‘i's native flora. Click the UH Press logo to the right to go to the UH Press website for a look at A Native Hawaiian Garden.

Undoubtedly, this site will contain errors in spelling, grammar and (hopefully, not too many) dates and facts. I apologize in advance for these. If you wish to contact me about these errors or comment on the website, please email me at: koebele@nativehawaiiangarden.org.

Lastly, a note on webpage title colors. To help you decide which native plants to try first and which ones you should wait awhile, I have color-coded the webpage title so a green title means an easy to grow and maintain plant, a red title means a plant with significant challenges to success, and an orange title is for all those plants somewhere inbetween.

Ā ā Ē ē Ī ī Ō ō Ū ū