WAILUKU – A commitment to carrying out a family tradition has earned David and Martha Vockrodt Moran and the Friends of D.T. Fleming Arboretum the fifth annual Malama i ka ’Aina Award.
Sponsored by the Maui Invasive Species Committee, the Maui Association of Landscape Professionals and Maui County, the award recognizes a plant provider, landscape professional or business for efforts to keep invasive species out of Maui County.The Maui Garden Club also joined in the recognition by contributing a $2,000 cash award to the arboretum earlier this month during the annual Arbor Day gathering held at the Maui Nui Botanical Gardens.
“I’m just honored to receive it,” David Moran said about the award. “My main part is to support my wife. . . . She’s totally dedicated to this, and I get a lot out of helping her carry out her family tradition.”
Martha Moran is the granddaughter of the late D.T. Fleming, an agronomist, who was given a 17-acre cinder cone, known as Pu’u Mahoe, in Ulupalakua. Former landowner Edward Baldwin donated the land to Fleming to thank him for controlling pamakani, an invasive, toxic shrub that had take over the pastures in the area. Fleming had introduced a wasp that effectively controlled the pasture weed, according to an announcement of the Morans’ award.
Fleming established the arboretum on 7 acres at Pu’u Mahoe in 1952. And, as a young child, Martha Moran spent many weekends traveling from her home in Lahaina to her grandfather’s arboretum with her parents, the late Jack Vockrodt and Euphence Fleming Vockrodt.
The Vockrodts would pack up their family station wagon with Martha and her three sisters, and a band of family dogs and cats, to visit the family property and help care for the arboretum.
Martha Moran said her early years were spent horseback riding on the family property, but when she became a teenager and then after college, she joined her parents in working the land.
“I was like a real farmer, and we were tending to the land,” she said.
The Vockrodts were given the responsibility of caring for the arboretum after Euphence’s father died in the mid-1950s. Around the year 2000, the Morans took over the property and the arboretum from Martha’s parents.
“It really is a family heritage,” Martha Moran said. “I feel it is a duty, and it certainly is a meaningful one.”
David and Martha Moran were recognized with the Malama i ka ’Aina Award for all of their physical labor and contributions of tools and equipment “and for being much of the driving force behind the work at the arboretum.”
Part of the purpose behind the D.T. Fleming Arboretum is to preserve Maui’s dryland forest species. The arboretum includes a collection of 145 species, many of which are rare or endangered.
For example, arboretum is the home of the last reproductive tree of the alani (Melicope knudsenii). Friends of the D.T. Fleming Arboretum have carefully harvested, distributed and germinated its seeds, working to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
Moran said she founded the Friends of the Arboretum group about five years ago to get volunteers to help her and her husband with the upkeep of the plants and the area.
“The arboretum was sort of like a museum of trees, and it really needed help in part because of its old age,” she said.
The Morans and the volunteers of the Friends of D.T. Fleming Arboretum have made significant strides.
The arboretum, for example, has become a seed source for restoration projects, providing seeds, cuttings and seedlings for annual Arbor Day tree giveaways and to other arboretums and botanical gardens throughout the islands.
Seeds from the native ohe, also known as tetraplasandra hawaiiensis, harvested at the arboretum will be used to help bring trees back to Polipoli Forest.
The arboretum also has an active education program, which includes propagation workshops and teaching interested individuals about tree grafting and techniques for growing native hibiscus.
In addition to active control of invasive species on the property, Friends of the D.T. Fleming Arboretum have worked to protect a number of the wiliwili trees from the highly damaging Erythrina gall wasp. A group of seedlings will be planted outside the arboretum for further experiments on gall wasp control.
Martha Moran holds monthly tours through the arboretum for both educational and land appreciation purposes.
“It’s really complimentary to the work we’re doing,” said Teya Penniman, manager of the Maui Invasive Species Committee. She said her office works at controlling and working to restore ecosystems, especially dryland native forest by growing damaged native Hawaiian plants.
The Morans and the Friends are doing the same type of work.
“It’s a constant battle for them,” Penniman said, referring to the challenges posed by feral pigs, cattle and fire weed, among other things, to the work of restoring and preserving native Hawaiian plants.
Ernie Rezents, a certified arborist and professor emeritus of agriculture at the University of Hawaii and Maui Community College, nominated the Morans for the Malama i ka ’Aina Award.
“Without their work, Pu’u Mahoe and the arboretum would be taken over by invasive species, as is the nearby Auwahi. The plants in the arboretum would be dead or dying, as they are in the Auwahi, to kikuyu grass and forest termites,” Rezents wrote in nomination papers.
As a heavy equipment operator and business owner, David Moran, according to Rezents, donates his time and his machines to remove wattle trees, mows kikuyu grass and wattle seedlings, prepares sites for new seedlings and installs fences.
Martha Moran is the organizer and go-getter, who founded the Friends and serves as the group’s president. She works effectively to recruit volunteers.
As a horticulturist and educator, Rezents said he’s aware of how much time and effort it takes to keep the arboretum thriving.
The Morans nominated the Friends of the D.T. Fleming Arboretum to receive the Malama i ka ’Aina Award, but unbeknownst to them, they were recommended for the same honor.
In the end, it was decided to recognize both David and Martha Moran as individuals and the Friends as an organization.
For more information about the D.T. Fleming Arboretum, visit its Web site at www.flemingarboretum.org.
Claudine San Nicolas can be reached at claudine@mauinews.com.
