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As one flies over the Kauai landscape and looks down, what is not black or red is some shade of green. The nickname "Garden Isle" is most appropriate. Everywhere you look you see a mad profusion of lush tropical plants. We are told that most of these plants have been introduced from elsewhere. That may well be the case, but they are obviously deliriously happy in their new home. As to specifically who or what introduced each of these emerald jewels there is little known, but the usual suspects are birds, waves and wind with humans tagging along in last place. From my non-scientific point of view, a plant that got to Kauai on a wave or a zephyr, or even in avian guano is sufficiently native for me to give it a pass and I don't even have much of a problem with the immigrants planting taro in their terraced fields. Also I am not convinced that we are as smart as we think we are about all of this. While we were visiting one of the botanical gardens we read about scientists that had found local fossil evidence of plants that had once been thought to have been introduced. (What makes anyone think that just because it is a fossil it is "native." Kauai surfaced six million years ago as bare rock.) Anyway it got here, the flora on the Garden Isle is spectacular.
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