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WNPC Honolulu Healing Garden

The Healing Garden at Ka Hale Ola is Mo Makani's masterwork -- the space he designed personally, the garden he chose every plant for, the outdoor environment that embodies his belief that healing is a relationship between people, place, and the land they share.

Every other WNPC garden was designed by landscape architects in consultation with the clinical team. The Honolulu healing garden was designed by Mo. He chose the plants. He determined their placement. He arranged the cultural protocols that govern the garden's maintenance. He planted some of them himself, with his hands in the soil, because in Hawaiian culture the act of planting is itself a form of prayer -- you are asking the land to grow something, and the asking should be done with your body, not delegated to a contractor.

Plantings

The garden's plants are not chosen for aesthetic effect alone. They are chosen for their place in Hawaiian culture and their role in lā'au lapa'au -- traditional Hawaiian herbal medicine.

Tī leaf (kī) grows throughout the garden -- used in Hawaiian spiritual practice for cleansing, protection, and healing. Tī leaf is placed at the clinic's entrance, used in blessing ceremonies, and available to patients and practitioners who incorporate it into their healing work. Kukui (candlenut) -- the state tree of Hawai'i -- provides shade and carries cultural significance as a symbol of enlightenment and protection. Its oil is used in traditional medicine for skin conditions and wound care. 'Ōlena (Hawaiian turmeric) grows in the garden's raised beds, used in traditional medicine as an anti-inflammatory and healing agent. Kō (sugarcane) grows for its cultural significance and its traditional use as a source of energy and nourishment. 'Awa (kava) -- deeply significant in Hawaiian and Pacific Islander ceremonial practice -- grows in a dedicated section, cultivated with the particular care that a sacred plant requires. Noni, used in traditional medicine throughout Polynesia, grows alongside the medicinal plants.

The ornamental plantings include plumeria and pikake (whose scent defines the clinic's olfactory identity), loulu (native fan palm), hāpu'u (tree fern), and native groundcovers that create the lush, layered green that Hawai'i's tropical climate sustains year-round.

Water Garden

The garden's water feature is not a fountain or a stream but a small lo'i -- a flooded taro garden that references the agricultural practice central to Hawaiian culture for a thousand years. Taro (kalo) holds a sacred place in Hawaiian cosmology -- in the Kumulipo (Hawaiian creation chant), taro is Hāloa, the elder sibling of humanity. The lo'i is both a water feature (the still, reflective water providing the WNPC acoustic and visual signature) and a cultural statement: the most sacred plant in Hawaiian culture grows at the center of the healing garden, tended by the staff and by patients who participate in the cultural gardening program.

The lo'i is accessible -- the pathways around it are smooth and level, and a wheelchair user can approach the water's edge and observe (or participate in tending) the taro. The reflective surface of the flooded field catches sky and clouds, and the visual effect is distinctly Hawaiian -- different from the moving water of Baltimore's fountain or the stream channels of the mainland gardens. The lo'i is still water. The stillness is part of the healing.

Cultural Protocols

The garden follows cultural protocols that Mo established and that the staff maintain:

The garden was blessed before it was planted. Plants are addressed in Hawaiian when they are tended -- not because the plants understand language, but because the practice of speaking to the garden in Hawaiian maintains the language in daily use and connects the act of gardening to the cultural tradition it comes from. Harvesting of medicinal plants for lā'au lapa'au is done by practitioners who understand the protocols -- which plants can be harvested when, how to take without depleting, how to give thanks to the plant and the land for what is taken.

The garden is not a museum of Hawaiian botany. It is a living pharmacy, a sacred space, and a clinical tool that functions simultaneously on three registers: the botanical (the plants have medicinal properties), the cultural (the plants have spiritual and cultural significance), and the therapeutic (the garden itself -- the green, the water, the scent, the stillness -- provides the sensory healing that every WNPC garden provides, expressed in the particular language of Hawai'i).

What the Garden Means to Mo

Mo designed this garden because he believes -- not as metaphor but as practice -- that the land heals. The land heals because it was here before the clinic, before the neighborhood, before the city, and it will be here after. The plants that grow in it carry the knowledge of Hawaiian medicine in their leaves and roots. The water that feeds the lo'i connects the garden to the hydrological cycle that connects the mountains to the ocean. The garden is not adjacent to the healing. The garden IS the healing, expressed in soil and chlorophyll instead of in clinical language.

When Mo sits in the garden at the end of a long day -- and he does, almost every evening, on a bench near the lo'i where the taro grows -- he is not resting. He is participating in the relationship between the healer and the land that makes healing possible. He learned this from his tutu. He built it into the clinic. And the garden grows, year-round, in the Hawaiian sun, producing the medicine and the quiet and the beauty that no pharmaceutical company can manufacture.

Locations WNPC Locations Honolulu Kalihi Accessible Spaces Outdoor Spaces Therapeutic Gardens Hawaiian Culture Traditional Medicine