RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
But in the first of two reports, NPR senior correspondent Ketzel Levine discovers that while Kaua'i's native flora continue to be lost, they are also sometimes found.
KETZEL LEVINE: And mints, violets, hollies, primrose - common names, but uncommon plants whose seed miraculously took root here on this island millions of years before people arrived. In the hierarchy of native flora, these are the ancients, overhead and under foot, everywhere I turn, flourishing in a terrarium of a habitat where rain is measured in feet and where the plump ohia blooms.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS)
LEVINE: Unidentified Man: (Singing in Foreign Language)
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANT)
LEVINE: Plants are inseparable from the Hawaiian language. Ohana, the word for family, is rooted in the taro's bulb.
SABRA KAUKA: We come from plants. Our whole philosophy of explaining how we end up on earth comes from plants. We're descendants of plants.
LEVINE: The voice of Sabra Kauka is a familiar one on Kaua'i. She's a champion of Hawaiian language, culture and the traditionally uses of native plants.
KAUKA: So if we see them thriving, we know that we, too, as a people, will thrive. We see them disappear, we, too, disappear.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
LEVINE: And so the need for today's journey with field botanist from the National Tropical Botanical Garden here on Kaua'i, Steve Perlman, who, over the decades - along with a handful of other adventurers - has quite literally risk his life to save endangered plants.
STEVE PERLMAN: We are going to try and collect some seeds from the rarest of the Hawaiian orchids, platanthera holochila, because we're down to only, as far as I know, one plant left on Kaua'i.
LEVINE: Goats, rats, sheep - they're also invasive species. But trumping them all for sheer destructive power is the wild pig.
PERLMAN: In fact, we're going to be tracking our way across the Alakai Swamp using some old hunter trails.
LEVINE: Man, all these gorgeous flowering ginger, and I can't even enjoy it because it's an invasive plant.
DAVID BENDER: Yeah, it's hard to enjoy when you know what it's doing to the ecosystem.
LEVINE: So what is it doing to the ecosystem?
BENDER: Well, as you can see, just...
LEVINE: Also on staff of the botanical garden is restoration ecologist David Bender.
BENDER: Nothing can germinate and grow underneath the shade of this ginger. So the more it spreads - and it spreads really vigorously - the more area it takes over.
LEVINE: When Hurricane Iniki ravaged Kaua'i in 1992, some of the rare species Steve Perlman had been monitoring disappeared. He's not going to let that happen this morning, as we step through spongy bog and close in on the green fringed orchid, the last of its kind on Kaua'i.
PERLMAN: You know, we look under here, just three tiny, little plantlets.
LEVINE: And he scores.
PERLMAN: It's - just going to work my way along the stem.
LEVINE: Wow, it's tiny.
PERLMAN: Fully ripe. Yeah, hundreds of seeds in each pod. So...
LEVINE: Unidentified Child #1: Right there. Right there's the flower.
LEVINE: A child's wonder is part of the payoff for botanists like Steve Perlman, who's talking with kids at a native plant farm.
PERLMAN: This is cyda falleks(ph), and the Malavasi(ph) or...
LEVINE: Plants he's helped rescue now thrive here in cultivated fields under the watch of these second graders and their Hawaiian studies teacher, Sabra Kauka.
KAUKA: Unidentified Group: (Foreign Language spoken)
KAUKA: Unidentified Group: (Foreign Language spoken)
LEVINE: It takes a village and its children to save a native plant.
KAUKA: Unidentified Group: (Foreign Language spoken)
KAUKA: (Foreign Language spoken)
MONTAGNE: To see photos from Ketzel's adventure and follow the fate of the rare fringed orchid, stop by Ketzel's blog, where it's all Kaua'i all week at npr.org/talkingplants.