ʻIlima

ʻIlima blossoms are thin as tissue and no bigger than a coin, and it takes somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them to make a single lei.

That effort is exactly why the lei ʻilima was reserved for aliʻi, Hawaiian royalty. To give one was to give hours of quiet, patient work along with the flower.

It is the island flower of Oʻahu and one of the toughest native plants there is, blooming happily on dry, windy coastal ground where the soil is mostly rock and salt.