Visiting Kauai -- Native Flowers!

Last post I showed spectacular tropical flowers you can easily see in Kauai. (LINK) Those are from elsewhere in the tropics, brought to Hawaii because someone liked them.

Also in Kauai are native plants. It is believed that since the volcanic emergence of the Hawaiian Islands from the Pacific, 271 different plants have arrived without help from humans--as seeds, as pieces, traveling by bird, floating or on the wind--and established populations. From those 271 colonists, about 1200 species have evolved, spread over the Hawaiian Islands.  Here are some examples:

Plant Story: Morning Glories

morning glory, Amazon basin, Peru

   I like morning glories. Bright blue flowers that weren’t there last night--and that vanish in the early afternoon. Vines that drape over branches and walls. 

Ipomoea obscura

   Morning glories are in the genus Ipomoea (family Convolvulaceae). They are found throughout the tropics but especially in the New World. A few get north or south into temperate regions.

   There are 300-500 species of Ipomoea. (Why the range? Perhaps the same one was named twice, perhaps one that is widespread is really two. As data accumulates, the range of numbers decreases). 

Hawaiian Plants: Names in Hawaiian, Names in Latin, Names in English

View from Richardson Beach, Hilo, Hawaii

    Despite being part of the United States, Hawaiian plants have strong ties to Asia. The Asian connection suggests interesting comparisons to plants of the Americas. What plant was used to dye kapa purple? Are those almonds on the beach? 

 almonds? on Mauna Kea Beach, Hawaii

    Does the Hawaiian poppy have yellow sap like the similar-looking plant of Colorado?

    To look up answers to these questions I needed to know the name of the plant.

Plant identified with Hawaiian name

    For me, plant names let people talk about plants.  As a serious botanist, I would like to use whatever name the person to whom I’m talking uses.  I long ago decided I had to be bi-lingual, using common names with some people and scientific names with others.  Common names are local names. Even if we got everyone in the English-speaking world to agree to use the same common names, there would be different common names for the same plant in French, German, Polish, Arabic...or Hawaiian.

        One plunges Hawaiian plant identification to find they are called pohuehue, kukui, liliko’i...

  

      Scientific names were created to cut through the confusion resulting from multiple languages. The idea is that each species has only one scientific name. The scientific name is in Latin for historic reasons--when the system was set up, in the 1750‘s, Latin was the language that unified educated Europeans. The system works today.