Scientific Name: Canavalia hawaiiensis
Endemic: Lanai, Maui, Hawaii
Description: A climbing vine with very pubescent, trifolate leaves (three leaflets comprising a single leaf) and striking purple flowers. The flowers are similar to those of pea-flowers like the ‘Ohai (Sesbania tomentosa), but are a bright purple and have a white spot at the base of the petal and keel. After the flowers are pollinated, large seed pods with 3-9 tan colored seeds, about an inch in diameter, develop on the inside.
Distribution: This endemic plant is found in the dry forest of Lana’i, Maui and Hawai’i. It can easily be seen when driving down the dirt road to South Point on the Big Island where it grows mostly as a beautiful ground cover in one of the harshest conditions known in Hawaii.
Cultural Uses: The flowers and seeds of this spectacular vine are strung into extraordinary lei. The color of the flowers range from almost all white with splashes of purple to deep purple depending on which island you are on.
Landscape Uses and Care: This is a hardy plant, it does well in full sun and can handle little watering once established in the ground. It does fine growing up a trellis, chain-link fence or another tree but also does well as a ground cover. This is a very beautiful vine that doesn’t “take over” the host plant it climbs unlike many of the introduced, invasive vines like ivy gourd, maunaloa, maile pilau, banana poka and other passion fruit vines.
Extra Info: Many people are familiar with the plant called maunaloa (Canavalia cathartica), which is used to make maunaloa lei, what people don’t realize is that maunaloa is a non-native, highly invasive alien weed that is smothering our lowland forest plants. It can be seen taking over other plants from Waimanalo, O’ahu all the way down to Na’alehu on the Big Island and pretty much everywhere else in the state. ‘awikiwiki is the original flower for the “maunaloa” type lei and is not invasive like maunaloa, in fact it is not common anywhere. If you insist on using maunaloa it would be a good idea to gather all the flowers from the wild to prevent it from producing seeds and spreading further, don’t forget that you can even use maunaloa seeds for lei so collect those too!
Awikiwiki