story by Roland Gilmore
photos by Dana Edmunds

A warm wind is blowing on O‘ahu’s leeward coast: down from Mount Ka‘ala, through Makaha Valley and then out to sea. Not a strong wind, just enough to rustle the leaves of Dalani Tanahy’s wauke patch. Left untended, these paper mulberry plants will would grow like weeds, sending runners underground and shooting up new plants where you’d least expect them. But that sort of unfettered growth does nothing to suit Dalani’s purposes, and so her carefully managed crop of roughly 200 plants grows as uniformly as a field of corn, each eight-foot-high row separated by a mulch-covered walkway; branches regularly pruned at the trunk to create a smooth, unscarred bark; the whole works irrigated by drip-lines.

Read full articl on Hana Hou website.