McBryde Garden on Kauai

I have returned to Kauai after an absence of 3 1/2 years.  Glad to be back!  Despite having been here over a dozen times since 1980...probably at least 15...I had never been to McBryde Garden, a division of the National Tropical Botanical Garden.  This proved to be a beautiful and very interesting place, mainly devoted to Hawaiian plants, with some Hawaiian culture and imported plants included.  The tropical vegetation takes on some gnarly forms.

Silhouette of maximum gnarliness.

Fine hibiscus flower.

Tree branch labyrinth.

Of course, flowers bloom in Hawaii year round, but as in more northern latitudes, May is a good time to see them.  Even fallen petals on the ground make beautiful mosaics.

This is a stick house, built two years ago by a local artist.  From the outside it looks a bit like a capitol dome...or a bowerbird condo!  Those Australians build vertical oval shaped nests.

There's an oculus in the stick house, just like the one in the Pantheon in Rome.

A ficus tree spreads buttress roots.

Forget what this flower is called, but it's cool.

A new exhibit at the garden is a series of sculptures constructed entirely of Lego blocks.  This monarch butterfly has 60,000 Lego blocks in it and took the artist 600 hours of work to build it in his studio in Brooklyn.  There are 14 Lego sculptures scattered through the gardens.

I think this is a heliconia.

This tree was in full, brilliant bloom!  For a sense of scale, the tree is about 75 feet tall.

Big ol' tropical leaf in the forest.

The ground beneath the blooming tree pictured above.