Kauai Botanical Garden
National Tropical Botanical Garden at Kauai

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Locator Map: A white rectangle denotes an area just inland from the central south shore of the island of Kauai.
 The actual garden was about a 20-minute bus ride from the visitor center. It was huge; probably a steady walker would need two hours to cover it. We only visited one section that was near the bus drop-off/pickup point. Parts of this garden were used as a location site for many movies, including Donovan's Reef, South Pacific, and Jurassic Park.
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Spiky green palms, long-leafed yellow bushes, a manicured yellow-green hedge, lie along a rich green lawn and a red concrete path leading to a green frame house, only its roof and gables visible above the thick foliage.
The Visitor Center at the garden.

A narrow footbridge, slung from thick brown bamboo posts and floored with thinner tan bamboo stalks, arches away over a sunny green gully amongst rich dark green foliage.
This footbridge is near the starting point of the walking tour. We crossed it back and
forth several times. It's much sturdier than it looks.

At left, a tiny, rocky creek emerges from deep foreground shadows, its right bank slopes upward and is dotted with palm and other trees.
A view from the middle of the bamboo bridge, looking leftward.

Two large light purple, crinkle-edged flowers amid narrow, rubbery green leaves and stalks, cling to a tree trunk by means of a tangled skein of thin grey roots.
An epiphyte. That is, a plant that does not grow in soil but rather wraps its roots
around the trunks of other plants. There are many types of epiphytes in tropical
areas, including many orchids--but this is not an orchid.

Yellow-orange flowers resembling crested birds' heads and beaks, rise on long stalks amidst very large, long flat narrow green leaves.
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tropical flowers that follow the basic
bird-of-paradise form, but this is not a bird-of-paradise. The flower at right shows
that the "beaks" are actually seed pods.

A couple dozen vertical, spiky-petaled deep pink flowers nestle amongst a wealth of oval, deeply textured green leaves and grey branches.
I believe this is "red ginger". There are many tropical flowers called "ginger", all
different from the ginger that produces the edible root.

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