When Leilani Pearson, 42, moved to Maui in 2014 with her partner, they inherited his grandparents’ property, along with its 50-year-old gardenia bushes. Sometimes she made necklace leis by stringing the gardenias together using a needle and thread, as is common throughout Hawaii, but often she braided the flowers with lauhala, dried leaves from the hala tree, using techniques more common in Tahiti, where she was born and raised. Before long, she began to incorporate unusual flowers into large, flat, angular leis, setting scarlet lobster claw heliconia or luminescent blue jade vine blossoms or purple-tipped bromeliad flowers in plaits of lauhala.
Flower chains were brought to the Hawaiian islands by Polynesian voyagers about a thousand years ago. Native Hawaiians used them to honor gods, treat illness, protect surfers or simply as adornment. A 2003 book about the art form, “Nā Lei Makamae: The Treasured Lei,” co-authored by Marie A. McDonald, a noted lei authority, says that Hawaii’s early practitioners employed 85 varieties of plants, including banana leaves, the tassels of flowering sugar cane stalks and bulbous ruby red ohia ai (mountain apple). Though leis are just as popular now — people throughout Hawaii still give them for every occasion, from birthdays to funerals — the types of flowers and foliage used for most arrangements have narrowed to a handful of varieties, and many of the state’s once-abundant flower farms have given way to housing developments. Today an estimated 90 percent of flowers for leis such as dendrobium orchids are imported from countries like Thailand. What’s more, given that hundreds of blooms are sometimes required for a single strand that will likely wither the next day, more locals are making or buying leis made of sturdier stuff, from ribbons to candy.
But lately, a new generation of local floral designers are rejuvenating the native craft. When Lauren Shearer, 34, started her lei shop, Hawaii Flora + Fauna, in 2016 on Maui, where she grew up, she began looking at the island’s natural resources anew. Her designs include Bombax ceiba flowers threaded together to resemble a shocking pink lion’s mane and a dainty flapper-style necklace that’s made of mongoose vertebrae and green winged seed capsules from the aalii, an indigenous shrub. She has strung honeybees (“already deceased,” says Shearer) to underscore the interconnectedness of flowers and bees and, for a customer who wanted a “10 out of 10 on my weirdness scale,” threaded a mongoose skull, pheasant feathers and a centipede.
While Shearer and Pearson use more unusual components, Oahu-based Jill Harunaga, a cell and developmental biologist turned lei maker, upends familiar favorites. Traditional leis tend to be uniform in flora and pattern, but Harunaga, 39, favors color-blocked and asymmetrical ones. When she began making leis, she realized that she didn’t have enough of one type of flower in her yard to create a conventional garland, so she decided to improvise. “I had to figure out how I could make a lei with what I have,” she says. That meant fuchsia bougainvillea and cream-colored puakenikeni, an especially fragrant tubular blossom; or lime green agave flowers with blue jade and lavender crown flowers from the giant milkweed shrub.
Andrew Mau, 37, a floral designer and the owner of the Island-Boy lifestyle boutique in Honolulu, is equally resourceful. Sometimes he’ll use the entire flower; other times, only the petals. The former furniture designer is especially interested in what he calls the symbiotic relationship between flowers, as with the fragile, crepelike kou and poofy carnations, which are about the same size. “They want to be friends,” he says. “But one needs space and one needs to be squished. Together they make an even lei.” Mau also tries to minimize flower waste by stringing leftover buds with other organic material, including stephanotis calyxes, coconut shells, seashells and baby bananas. Why labor over something so impermanent? “It’s a gift,” says Mau, and one that’s meant to make an impact.
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