My Yellow Ginger Lei

Richard Ha writes:

Yesterday I took my friend Riley Smith and Nancy Alvord on a tour of our farm. We looked at bananas, and at tomatoes and sweet potatoes and the rushing water that will power our hydroelectric plant. We went to see banana ripening rooms and hydroponically grown cucumbers and sweet corn and other things.

I also took them "off road" to see what the original vegetation here looked like and told them what I hoped to do with it. Nancy commented that the ginger smelled good, and I was so surprised to notice that the yellow ginger flowers were starting to bloom everywhere. Just a week ago there was only a handful of flowers.

 

Later in the day, I went back to look again at what Nancy noticed. Sure enough, there were ginger blossoms everywhere and it was quite a difference from just one week ago.

It made me remember that "My Yellow Ginger Lei" was the first slack key song I learned from Pop.

Comments

[Sonia]

I love all of the ginger flowers, but the white ginger which we Cubans call Mariposa (butterfly) especially.... it is the national flower of Cuba....
Spent the day on Tuesday in Volcano and was thrilled to see all of the Kahili ginger blooming....Yes, I know it is invasive, but still, it is so pretty and smells so good!

[Richard Ha]

I too like the looks of the white ginger. Mariposa? Thanks for sharing.

We have some Kahili ginger at home. It's easily controlled. I think I'll plant some under the fiddle weed, to shade out the young plants. That is becoming the number one difficult to control invasive plant in the Pepeekeo area.