Hawaii is the home of the world's greatest collection of tropical and subtropical plants. The Islands' benign and varied microclimates have accepted plants from many different places, ranging from the humid jungle rain forests to arid deserts, and from seacoasts sprayed with salt to mountainsides of almost Andean heights. With the enormous variety of plants that have made Hawaii one great botanical garden, comes also a great curiosity and search for knowledge about them.

This volume features more than 100 striking plants, grown for their colorful or exotic flowers and foliage. All of these exotics have proved successful for the amateur gardener in Hawaii, including several unusual new varieties and cultivars, only recently made available commercially. Among these are the Hawaiian butterfly anthurium, the jewel of Burma ginger, ice-blue calathea, and a rare ginger from Tahiti.