The history of lavender in Europe is known to love this fragrant herb, but it took some detective work to discover the history of lavender in Hawaii. It all started when a lavender farm in my home island of Maui asked to help write a book about the plant. The owner of the farm, which is of Hawaiian descent, is a sort of mystical sense of the history of the lavender plant in the islands. He told me he was sure he was a beloved plant and used by the nobility and the Royals of the Hawaiian kingdom, and he sought to discover how this Mediterranean plant got here. Since my specialty is writing about the

 

history of Hawaii, began eagerly searching. Had an advantage, because people had given the farm a copy of a song called Pua of lavender - lavender flower - published in1870 in a Hawaiian newspaper. It was a sweet love song, in which the beloved is compared to a flower of lavender. Hawaiians had many newspapers in the nineteenth century, the traditional print stories, poems and news of the day. Fortunately for those of us who do not read the Hawaiian and have no time to dig around in archives, a project to convert all the old newspapers to digital, and many are now available on the Internet. When looking at the online collection of the newspaper, I found two ads that mentioned the old lavender. One was from 1849, describing the contents of a shipment that included new products ranging from silk stockings white ladies in the brines for rope, and including the lavender water. In 1869 a store was advertising "in the lavender of maikai ka wai (" water of lavender fine ") and" hoikeike the boke of lavender ka. "That word" boke "I launched off the top - -no such word in the Hawaiian dictionary - but on the other hand I realized that was probably the word "class" written in the phonetic use of Hawaiians in the way in adopting English words. Since the "hoikeike" means "display," perhaps this was a bouquet of dried lavender sent across the ocean as decorative items. None of these results to answer our questions - when and how the lavender plant first arrived in Hawaii? I read biographies of famous men by bringing plants to the islands, called the local botanical gardens and the Bishop Museum, talked to historians at the state archives and university professors in the department of agriculture in Hawaii, but nobody could answer my question. I asked all my friends who are in the skins of Hawaiian history, who are working on several books and have read many diaries and letters of the missionary. One found a reference in the diary of missionary Amos Cooke on "our esteemed Juliette" was afflicted with palpitations, added that "a spoonful of lavender soon relieved." The diary entry was from 1849 - Juliette Sorbian maybe some of that lavender water mentioned in the notice of old newspaper! In the files contained in the mission museum in Honolulu, I found no mention of lavender, but had hoped that the missionaries of the Order of New England had kept a record of what surely brought with them and what they planted in their gardens. Yes, his diaries and letters mentioned things like roses and figs, but no lavender. I left disappointed files, but as I walked beyond the original homes of the missionaries, preserved in a busy street in downtown Honolulu, I take a look over and found a lavender plant growing right on the doorstep of one of the buildings old. I was so excited could not stop talking about it for days! This was surely a good sign. Then I talked to the guard at the site of Washington, which was the private property of the last monarch of Hawaii, Queen Liliuokalani. The queen is left behind a handwritten list of the plants in your garden, and guess what was in it: "lavender bush." It seemed as the queen herself was a lover of lavender! Alas, despite these clues, and we certainly felt that these missionaries and Royals would have increased workers Anglophile and had a plant that was used so many practical uses and was so beloved in Victorian times, we never learned exactly when and how Lavender came to Hawaii. Remains an unsolved mystery. But I still have hope. Maybe one day someone unearth a history that letter to describe how a missionary's wife nursed a soft lavender plant in the long sea voyage around the horn, and we will have our answer. Meanwhile, we love Hawaii, particularly on the sunny slope of Haleakala on Maui lavender. And now increasingly, Hawaii loves lavender.