Allerton Garden, Kauai

By far my favorite part of our trip to Kauai was going to the Allerton Garden. Not everyone is a botanical garden type of person, but I sure am. Designed and built by art collector and patron Robert Allerton and his partner John Gregg, the garden is organized into a series of “rooms” that each have a theme, like the bamboo room and the mermaid room, and it became a sort of living museum for the plants and statuary that Allerton and Gregg collected during their world travels.
My favorite part was seeing the giant fig trees that were featured in the movie Jurassic Park. Inspired, we picked up a cutting from a plumeria plant in the gift shop before we left, the beginnings of our own international plant collection.
On a side note, we saw a lot of these spiders in the garden which on the one hand remind me of something out of a Super Mario Brothers video game but on the other hand give me horrible, horrible nightmares.

The Plumeria Tree

When Brian and I went on a trip to the island of Kauai last year for New Years, we came back with a cutting from a Plumeria plant that we bought at the Allerton Garden gift shop. We followed the directions that came with it and for a long time we didn’t think that it was going to grow. It just looked like a dead stick. I’ve had some experience with growing succulents from cuttings and I know it takes a lot of patience, but it didn’t look very promising for a long time. We placed it in water and kept it inside, and for about two months nothing happened. Then suddenly out of nowhere, we saw one little white root sticking out of the bottom of the stump! We planted it in a pot and then it really started to take off. On the instructions that came with the cutting, it says that the tree may take up to three years to produce flowers, but after only a year our tree is flowering!

The first bloom!
I think it really likes the Florida weather. We only bring it inside when it gets too close to freezing (which didn’t happen at all this winter) or too close to 100 degrees in the summer. We love watching our tree grow! The entire experience has been very satisfying so far.