Their clusters of nuts in
all stages of growth are yellow, their fan-like leaves, which are
from twelve to twenty feet long, are yellow, and an amber light
pervades and surrounds them. They provide milk, oil, food, rope,
and matting, and each tree produces about one hundred nuts annually.
The pandanus, or lauhala, is one of the most striking features of
the islands. Its funereal foliage droops in Hilo, and it was it
that I noticed all along the windward coast as having a most
striking peculiarity of aerial roots which the branches send down to
the ground, and which I now see have large cup-shaped spongioles.
These air-roots seem like props, and appear to vary in length from
three to twelve feet, according to the situation of the tree. There
is one variety I saw to-day, the "screw pine," which is really
dangerous if one approached it unguardedly. It is a whorled
pandanus, with long sword-shaped leaves, spirally arranged in three
rows, and hard, saw-toothed edges, very sharp. When unbranched as I
saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times
magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all
about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and
branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports
itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one
of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands.
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