(instrumental music) Kalaʻi Miller: Aloha, I’m Kalaʻi Miller.

We begin this episode of Home is Here at a green oasis at the edge of Downtown Honolulu.

Foster Botanical Garden is a place where anyone can escape the hustle and bustle, with a stroll through 13-acres that are rooted in history.

(instrumental music) Joshlyn Sand / Honolulu Botanical Gardens Director: I think when you come in here,   you're going to be struck by the scale of the collections.

They've been here so long.

And you're immediately humbled or at least I am,   by the size of the trees and the scope of what's here right in front of you.

You have to look up and down and all around there is surprises everywhere.

The history of Foster Botanical Garden is   very long and very involved and it came to get together over decades.

But at the end of the day, what people can always carry home with them is that Foster Botanical Garden and our neighbor garden Liliʻuokalani right across the freeway were gifts to the people of Hawaiʻi by Hawaiians.

The property originally was five acres that belonged to Queen Kalama.

And she leased that to Dr. William Hildebrand.

He started Queenʻs hospital with Queen Emma.

And so a lot of the trees that you see at Queenʻs hospital you also see here at Foster Garden because he lived and breathed plants and and civic duties you know were incredible.

When he returned to Germany, he eventually sold the property to Thomas and Mary Foster and they built a beautiful Victorian home up on our main terrace, three stories high and lived here until she bequeathed it to the city in 1930.

Mary Foster was a very interesting person sort of ahead of her time.

She was the daughter of James Robinson.

And he was a shipbuilder from London, and he came here in the early 1800s, around 1820.

He has a whole interesting story about how he got here.

He was shipwrecked on an atoll out in the middle of the ocean coming from Japan.

And they had to build a schooner and and save themselves and get to Honolulu.

He stayed.

He married Rebecca Prevor, and she was a descendant of Hawaiian ancestry of aliʻi from Maui, and from the Big Island, so half Hawaiian.

When she was 16, she married Thomas Foster, who was also shipbuilder from Nova Scotia.

Thomas passed away rather early about 53.

So she lived a long time here on the property by herself, and she was very affected by the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

She was a dear friend of Queen Liliʻuokalani.

She was the sister of Victoria Ward.

She was also very upset at you know about being widowed, she didn't have children.

And so she did something kind of unusual.

She was seeking answers for all this pain and all this trauma in her life.

And she reached out to Buddhism.

And she befriended a Sri Lankan monk, the Anagarika Dharmapala.

And she had a huge hand in the revivalism of the Buddhist religion that happened around the turn of the century.

She did huge denote donations to temples in Sri Lanka, she had an integral part in returning the bodhi temple in India, the original temple that Buddha sat under to gain enlightenment back to the Buddhist religion.

And she, she she funded hospitals in Sri Lanka, scholarships to Kamehameha, land she bought for Hawaiian people to occupy and become farmers.

Mary's influence is still present all up and down the Nuʻuanu corridor.

She had properties along this area, grew up in Nuʻuanu.

And she gave the land for the Honpa Hongwanji Betsuin Temple up right off Pali, as well as the Honpa Hongwanji Mission School and the Soto Academy.

And then of course, her ultimate gift of passing this land on in 1930.

It opened as Foster Park.

And the first director was Dr. Harold Lyon.

The original entrance was on School Street.

H-1 freeway changed all that, of course.

And now our entrance is down here on Vineyard.

The oldest part of the garden is of course the main terrace where Mary and Thomas had their elegant home and Dr. William Hildebrand had his cottage.

Then it had grown up to the 13 acres that it is today, and different theme gardens started to emerge.

So we have the we have a palm garden with palm collection.

We of course through the center of the garden have Mary's historic terraces.

We have the Daibutsu area.

We have a butterfly garden that was started by the Butterfly Association some years ago and it is an open air butterfly garden, not an enclosed, you know, caged butterflies, it's open air with pollinating plants to attract butterflies naturally.

We have our orchid conservatory, which is a great nod to our rich history of an orchid collection with Dr. Harold Lyon.

We are now sitting in the prehistoric glen.

And this was made possible through the vision of the Garden Club of Honolulu.

This won a founder's award in the early 60s when it opened.

And these are all ancient dinosaur plants.

Cycads are really ancient dinosaur plants came around a millions of years ago.

And there's all kinds of plants from the cold age here.

And they're very interesting.

They've got these crazy cones, these big cones are actually conifers.

And the newest part is right beyond this prehistoric glen.

And that's the economic garden that was the last parcel to be added.

So that's the area that you see when you're down Nuʻuanu - Vineyard corner.

And that's economic plants, spices and medicines and cultural plants and herbs and things like that.

The iconic bod tree greets you still today at the door and that was given to her by the Dharmapala from Sri Lanka and that is a descendant of the original bodhi tree in India that Buddha sat under to gain enlightenment.

Yeah, and she planted that in 1913.

But there's so many cool trees here.

Some of my personal favorites are the cuipo tree, which is a hibiscus relative, but it's the largest hibiscus you're ever gonna see.

It has a huge barrel like trunk just jetting up to the sky, it's almost so big, you can't see it.

Like it just kind of whoa, whoa, what's there.

The trees from Hillebrand's era, kapok up on the main terrace.

We have a double coconut.

Lodoicea maldivica from the Seychelles Islands.

This is a palm and it has the largest seed in the world.

So this is the seed inside the coconut.

Like our coconut we're familiar with, it'll have a big round husk on it, that you chip away.

And then inside is the seed.

And they would see these floating on the ocean and sailors back in times of your would think these were mermaids going diving down into the ocean, but it was actually a coconut from the Seychelles.

We were able to hand pollinate that and get more of these and that's extremely rare.

The corpse flower that's a showstopper.

That one you know, I cannot predict it.

They do not let us know when they are going to flower they do it when they want to do it.

But when they bloom it is just lined up out the gates.

We've had 3,000 people come to smell this awful smell.

And it is so funny because the flies are everywhere.

It's smells awful.

And people put their face in and they take a big whiff and they're like oh that's so awful and they hold it up and then they go right back in and smell it again.

And then of course, one of my favorites is also the cannonball tree, which has huge, aptly named fruits, the size of cannonballs, and just the most fragrant, gorgeous colored flower you can imagine.

And so people always ask, is this edible?

No, it’s not.

It’s just filled with a hard kind of mass and they’re seeds inside.

Down in South America I’m sure wildlife eats it.

But there’s nothing in it that people would really want to eat.

And, when you crack it open, that’s what you’re going to see inside.

And it will very quickly oxidize.

And something that’s interesting is it’ll kind of turn that, that cream white color will pretty quickly turn a nice blue purple because of the air in the oxidation process.

One of the things that we learned from the COVID pandemic is something we kind of intrinsically knew, but it really hit home was that these green spaces, botanical gardens, parks, they're not nice to have, their need to have.

They really are essential.

And when we were closed for so long and we opened back up, there were people lined up to get back in to connect with nature, to connect with each other.

And it really does restore the spirit to to be able to access.

We're all so busy, you know, we're in our cars, we're on the screens.

And to take a breath and come outside and see things like this, that you would you know, are just incredible, that you might be taking for granted is really important.

I'm always struck by what an honor it is to get to steward this property for the short time that I'm here.

I look back and remembering all the people that made this happen through, you know, over a century of time, and to be able to be to be the director for just a short bit is a real honor that not a lot of people get.

So, I consider it an honor and I want to steward it in the best way possible, preserve it in the best way possible.

So that you know, it'll be there and for another 100 years.

Kalaʻi Miller: Colorful, bold, modern.

Those are just a few words to describe the   artwork of Shar Tuiʻasoa.

Creativity is in her DNA and after years of struggling, she’s found success with her fresh take on Polynesian culture, women and life in Hawaiʻi.

Shar Tuiʻasoa / Punky Aloha Studio Illustrator: Punky is meant to describe like the aesthetic of my art.

And the aloha is kind of there to describe my ethos, how I conduct my business, I'm really big on being a part of community and giving back just the reciprocal nature of how we are, I think, in Hawaiʻi.

So that's kind of punky describing the style and aloha, describing like, my heart, you know.

I'm Shar Tuiʻasoa.

I'm the illustrator of Punky Aloha Studio.

I think my childhood was like any typical kid growing up in Hawaiʻi.

I grew up on the east side over here in Kailua.

And it was a wonderful childhood just going to the beach.

My mom was she was a wizard at finding all the free stuff for us to do so we, we never felt like we were ever without.

We were always like we were like even to put gas in the car.

She was having us roll pennies but like that was the only way we could leave the house is if we rolled enough pennies to put some gas in the car and she made it, turned it into a fun game.

My mom was an artist also.

So, when we were really little, she was dragging us with her to her art classes over at WCC.

She was studying under Snowden Hodges.

And that was kind of my first exposure to art.

Both of my parents, they never told us we couldn't draw on our walls and we didn't own our homes.

Okay?

We were renting and she was just like, whatever we can paint over it when we move out.

So even growing up as a kid, I'd create these worlds all over my walls.

That was like my little escape in my bedroom.

Yeah, so there was always encouragement to just express yourself and be imaginative.

I think my talent always kind of was the creative part.

Like the concept part.

I loved making characters.

But I will say with confidence that I was pretty terrible at drawing for a good part of my childhood, even into my teenage years.

But I think the skill set, the technique didn't come until like, after I graduated high school.

I went and actually decided, like, I was going to study art.

I wanted my ideas to like, I want people to see them and I couldn't really share them because they were just weren't great.

They weren't reading you know, like, what I saw in my head wasn't translating.

So, I went and studied Fine Art over at WCC for a while, years.

Also under Snowden Hodges, just like my mom.

And from there, I ended up applying to art schools on the continent, and went and got my illustration degree in California.

When I was going to WCC, I was working, you know, two or three jobs at a time to pay for school.

When I went up to college on the continent, I had to rely on scholarships, grants.

And I had help from my partner who came up with me and it was just plain and simple, it was a struggle.

We were you know, living off of welfare.

I was stretching $20 for an entire month, which I got really good at.

But I don't think I ever felt like, you know, woe is me.

I just kind of felt like, well, this is what we do, you know, whatever, you know, I don't really care.

You know, I'm just happy to be studying the thing that I love the most.

It kind of more so hit me after I graduated, and we came home.

I, I had a brand new baby.

I had nowhere to work.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

We were living with our parents.

We were just kind of moving around and kind of running out of any sort of money that we had.

And and that's that that's when it really hit me like okay we're about to not have anywhere to live pretty soon you know, I better you know, figure out what I'm going to do.

So, that's either going to be just, you know, just sort of forget art, and I'll just go back to bartending, which is a good job too.

It was just wasn't where my heart was.

Or I'm just gonna give it one last effort and see where it goes.

And that's where I just started kind of drawing again, it helped me kind of discover a new style of art that I had never done before which is more like flat graphic art rather than like these like highly rendered oil painting stuff that I was always doing.

We posted online and that's kind of how it all started just naturally.

I kind of draw the these Polynesian women and I always felt like they're A like the women I know like my cousins, my friends, my aunties.

I also feel like all of them are different parts of my personality of sometimes at least I draw myself the way I would like to present myself.

I don't think I'm nearly as cool as some of the women I draw.

I do use a lot of bright colors, bold colors.

I'm not one for like the beige pastel colors.

It's just it's not what my closet looks like.

It's not like what my personality is like.

I'm a pretty loud person.

And for a long time, I felt like I had to quiet that down.

I was almost I felt ashamed of it for a little while.

And then I started to accept it and really love it as I learned to love myself as I healed myself more.

And I think my art is definitely a reflection of this like, unapologetic way of entering any space with loud patterns and clothes.

Big hair.

I think as I'm drawing, I'm healing myself in that way and just not apologizing for any part of your personality anymore.

I think a lot with my heart so I think I lead with that probably more than I should.

But I'm of course inspired by Hawaiʻi.

I just, I'm in love with my home.

Obviously very inspired by my culture, by the cultures of the ocean.

I'm really inspired by people who have, you know, huge voices and they use it to do good.

I sometimes feel like really afraid to do that sometimes, but I'm really inspired by having purpose with your art.

Yeah, all over the place.

Just like to like I like to just eat it all up.

You know, everything.

Everything is inspiring.

Hi!

I’m Punky.

Punky Aloha.

That’s the nickname my grandma gave me.

She is my best friend, and we do everything together.

Grandma calls me her brave adventurer, which I am now, but I wasn’t before.

The truth is I wasn’t always brave.

Making new friends?

Now that was hard.

Oh the book Punky Aloha.

That was such a crazy thing.

I think often times I've learned in this journey I've had as a freelancer is that I've just been really fortunate some things have just kind of come to me.

And that is the case for the book.

So, doing a children's book has been a dream of mine, you know, forever.

And I got an email randomly, one day right at the beginning of 2020.

From an editor at Harper Collins, no less one of the big five so, and she just said hey, I ran across some of your artwork on Instagram.

We don't have any Pacific Islander children's book in the mainstream space.

You want to do one?

And I was like, are you, I thought it was I was being scammed to be honest.

I was like, how did she know that that's what I wanted to do.

And so we had a meeting and she's like, listen, I think you can do this, I want you to also write it.

And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is happening.

Anytime you see Punky Aloha in her home, it’s got a yellow theme to it.

But a, there’s a lot of little parts from a lot of our childhood that I wanted to include, which is why I think I like this page the best.

So we have these linoleum tiles.

I, my kitchen always had these like mustard yellow, like the stick-on tiles that we had with these funky little designs on it.

Um, and then on our counter always had a bottle of shoyu and always had rice cooking.

Got the NOH packets.

We have a fly swatter above the sink.

Yeah, this is one of favorites because it brings me right back to my childhood.

When I first started it, I was just like gung ho, like, I've been trained my whole life for this, you know, I can do a children's book, I can tell a cute story, kind of base it on me.

And then as I finished it, and we're getting closer to the release, I think it kind of hit me in the mainstream children's book space, the first Pacific Islander to publish, author and illustrate a children's book, and I didn’t realize that.

(instrumental music) And I was really scared that I was going to disappoint my community, not just the Pacific Islander community, but the Hawaiʻi community because you just put a lot of pressure on yourself.

And I just want to be a good positive representation.

And I think all of those things kind of swirl around when when you don't have a lot of us in the space, a lot gets put on your shoulders.

And I felt that really hard.

There's still a huge lack of representation of us in this particular space.

Hopefully, that changes even more, the more we start seeing like the possibilities of what we can do, I think the more we're going to be encouraged to step into spaces that we didn't know we quite belong.

I never take any of my successes for granted.

A lot of the times I'm working to give it away.

But living in Hawaiʻi is like a very, it's, it’s not easy to be able to stay home.

So, I never forget that it, it, you can be a day away from back to the struggle house again.

I'm only successful because my community has allowed me to be so I never forget that it's not just a me thing.

It's a village thing.

It’s a us thing.

I think I just kind of keep reaching for the stars and see what fun opportunities come.

Kalaʻi Miller: Art is not just something to be drawn or painted, it can also be sewn.

Here on Oʻahu, there’s a special group using needle and thread to express themselves.

(instrumental music) Ric Stark /Hawaii Quilt Guild member: Hawaii Quilt Guild.

Na Poʻe Humukuiki O Hawaiʻi, which is the people who hand stitch of Hawaiʻi.

That's the literal translation is a guild that was established in 1984.

Our mission, of course, to share and come together and learn and practice quilting in Hawaiʻi.

But beyond that we have our mission statement involves sharing our knowledge.

Donna Kanealiʻi/Hawaii Quilt Guild member: Every quilt that you, you end up making has something special.

And there's a lot that goes behind it too.

Because the challenge brings out different feelings that you have for whatever it is you're doing.

Whether it's, what does aloha mean to you and the flowers because I love the flowers.

Each, each challenge has something special that comes out.

Ric Stark /Hawaii Quilt Guild member: Before Westerners arrived here, Hawaiian clothing was kapa, this mulberry bark pounded out by hand.

The missionaries arrived in 1820.

And they brought with them their needles and their threads and their fabrics.

And they started teaching the Hawaiian women the art of sewing with needle and thread.

We have really fuzzy history for the next 40 years, but by 1860, we have this totally unique, nowhere else in the world art of Hawaiian quilting.

When fabric first came, it was very precious.

Almost for maybe the first 50 years, almost all the fabric that came by ship from San Francisco was white, blue, and red.

The old Hawaiian quilts are created, we call this whole cloth applique.

So, you take one piece of red or blue fabric, fold it three times and cut out a stencil, which then gives you a snowflake design.

That then, is appliqued onto, in the old days, onto the white background.

And then quilted and this is the part that is so unique to Hawaiʻi is the echo quilting.

Where the design itself creates the quilting pattern.

Usually, my quilts take two to three years.

This   quilt is a year in the making.

Only in Hawaiʻi do we do echo quilting.

One of the old-time kupuna had a saying she said, you don't take up Hawaiian quilting, Hawaiian quilting takes you up.

And it's true.

So, if you've got that bug and that interest, you've got a quilt from grandmother or from somebody and you want to know, find an aunty.

That'll change your life.

That’s my Aunty Vi – Violet Hue.

For 10 years, Aunty taught me the craft of Hawaiian quilting.

This was my first quilt.

Took me four and a half years.

Aunty’s closing instructions when I finished this one - you can't move on to something else until I had the quilt all done but you have to use it.

So, I came up with and did a, this is my quilting bag.

And Aunty's instructions - you will never give this quilt away.

This is yours forever.

You keep it.

It reminds you where you who you were and where you started.

Donna Kanealiʻi/Hawaii Quilt Guild member: My advice to start quilting.

Pick fabrics that you like, go bold or go soft, whatever,   you know, whatever suits your your fancy.

It has to be something that excites you, because then you're going to see it finished.

You're going to want to see it done.

It's okay to make a mistake.

A lot of times a mistake will bring out the best because if you make a boo boo on a quilt, applique something over it, and you may have just enhanced the quilt immensely.

So everything goes.

Just go for it.

Kalaʻi Miller: Mahalo for joining us.

It’s because of the generosity of viewers like you that we can share these local stories.

If you’d like to support our mission to advance learning and discovery, please visit pbsawaii.org and click on the donate button.

For Home is Here, I’m Kalaʻi Miller.

A hui hou.

(instrumental music) Joshlyn Sand / Honolulu Botanical Gardens Director: But when she lived here, she had a huge beautiful Victorian home up on the main terrace.

It's gorgeous.

Three stories high.

You could go up on the top turret and see Thomas's ships down in Honolulu Harbor.

It was very wild.

The garden was very wild big trees, it was a little bit less manicured.

She had Galapagos tortoises, she had monkeys.

It was just a very different different like look than it is right now.

But very, very beautiful and completely Mary Foster.

Shar Tuiʻasoa / Punky Aloha Studio Illustrator: I used to surf a lot.

I used to hike a lot.

Now I just work.

That's the truth.

Now, when I have any free time, it's honestly just spent loving my family and spending time with the kids and my husband.

That's it.

Just the simple life.

Ric Stark /Hawaii Quilt Guild member: That's another one of my my sayings.

I am one of the most impatient.

When I got it, I want it done now.

Hurry up.

Let's get it done.

Hawaiian quilting has taught me patience.