Economic Woods of Hawaii 715 



forty or fifty feet, but are customarily of short or even dwarf 

 stature. The Hawaiians sometimes used the fleshy fruits as 

 food, and wove fans and hats from the delicate fibrous, young 

 leaves, which they collected before the leaf -blade had expanded. 

 No economic uses are known for the wood or trunk, which is 

 like that of other palms in structure. 



The tree-ferns constitute a beautiful and important element in 

 many of our Hawaiian forests. There are two species — Cibotium 

 Menziesii, the hapu i' i' i or larger tree-fern, and C. Chamissoi, 

 the hapu or lesser tree-fern. Chamisso's tree-fern is abundant on 

 all the islands in the lower and middle forest zones. Its trunk 

 is twelve to fifteen feet high, at its maximtmi growth; ordinarily 

 it is not more than five or six feet. Menzies' tree-fern becomes 

 much larger than the other, and often attains truly magnificent 

 proportions, the trunk of twenty to twenty-five feet, and the 

 beautiful crown of wide-spreading fronds carrying the total height 

 up to nearly forty feet. This species occurs on all the islands at 

 elevations of from two- to six-thousand feet, but reaches its finest 

 development, both as to stature and area, on the island of Hawaii. 

 In the dense humid jungle-forests, which lie along the entire wind- 

 ward side of Hawaii, from the Kohala Mountains in the north 

 along the middle slopes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and south 

 into the districts of Hiloa and Puna, the hapu i'i'i is abimdant. It 

 luxuriates in the humid shade of the lehua, and forms extensive pure 

 stands of undercover. The tall slender lehuas rise to eighty or one 

 hundred feet, the tree-ferns form an unbroken canopy below them, 

 at an elevation of thirty or forty feet. 



The tree-ferns are not valuable as timber, for their soft, spongy 

 trunks are weak and easily crushed. However, the trunks are 

 often cut into lengths, like cordwood, and used in the construc- 

 tion of corduroy roads and trails through the soggy jungle country. 

 Frequently these fern billets are piled into fences — the buds sprout 

 and the fence is draped with its own greenery. Although the 

 outer rind of the tree-fern trunk is hard and fibrous, owing to the 

 abundance of old leaf -bases, and extremely plentiful, appressed 

 aerial roots, the large central interior portion is starchy. This was 

 formerly used by the natives, in times of scarcity, for food. They 

 thoroughly baked or roasted the stems, to prepare the starch 

 for eating. Nowadays this material is used chiefly as food for 

 swine, in the vicinity of the crater Kilauea, where the numerous 

 steam cracks furnish free fuel for the baking of the fern stems. 



