KUILEI’S CROWN FLOWER

If you remember awhile back, we talked about how many of the prints this year would be inspired by my Grandma, Theresa Kuilei Kamahele Marzo. Our second print in this collection is Kuilei’s Crown Flower, in remembrance for the crown flower plants that grew in front of her home in Maku’u just past the long luau table and chairs that many Sunday pot lucks were enjoyed on. .
I don’t know when they came to be, who planted them lovingly, probably knowing all the joy it would bring to all of us grandkids. One day they were tiny plants, and the next they were these full grown trees complete with their tiny miracles of caterpillars 🐛 that blossomed into butterflies. Those butterflies would greet us everytime we pulled up to her home, with those gorgeous wings welcoming us back...

And oh the Pua (flowers)! Such an elegant beauty, blossoms hidden in capsules until the petals are ready to peel back and reveal what’s hidden. Many a lei was born from those crown flower plants....picked, strung, crafted, around an old luau table on a late Sunday afternoon....

When thinking of this collection, all the prints that went into it, I often went back and forth, back and forth......Should I call it Kuilei’s collection? Or Maku’u, for the place that my grandmother lived, loved, and raised our big Hawaiian family on.

. But then I thought...

What is a place without its people?
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So Kuilei’s Collection it came to be. A celebration of a person and a place that are so connected in my memory that one cannot be remembered without the other...
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Kuilei’s Crown Flower for my Tutu’s crown flower plants that grew majestically at my grandparents home in Maku’u, Puna, Hawaii Island.