Chris and I moved to Tantalus and into the home that I grew up in about ten years ago.

We are both from Oahu and met while camping at Ho’omaluhia Botanical Garden, but fell in love when we were both living in San Francisco. We traveled together, including a year in New York, but it was impossible to forget Hawaii.

Returning to Tantalus to live with my mom after my dad died, it felt like Chris and I had found our own Secret Garden, with many areas nurtured and later abandoned.

Rumor is that in 1890, H.W. Schmidt, the consul for Sweden and Norway, won the property on Tantalus while playing poker against King Kalakaua. With the native forest already clear cut from the sandalwood trade and cattle grazing, Schmidt experimented with new crops, planting coffee, yerba mate, avocado, cinnamon and ornamental flowers.

Over the past 125 years, different people have tended the garden and there were also many years when no one lived in the house, allowing many plants to grow wild.

My parents, with my brothers and I, moved to Tantalus in 1987 — I was just a baby. In the yard, my family battled invasive species that had taken over, particularly strawberry guavas, which come from the Amazon forest. In their place, bananas, citrus and more flowers were planted.

It’s here that Chris and I have found it possible to fall more in love every day as we nurture the earth, working on native forest restoration and cultivating plants from past generations. We also started growing new crops such as mushrooms, cocoa, taro, and mamaki. Along with the tropical flowers that were already growing in the garden and just needed some TLC, we started collecting and planting more varieties. All of these old and new plants create what we now call Tantalus Botanicals.

I would like to think Chris and I are now shaping the land, but as I watch the earth grow, I’m humbled by the understanding that it is shaping us.