It's just a tiny strip in the middle of a highway, no more than 10 or 15 feet wide in most places, but new landscaping along Farrington Highway in Waipahu is changing the way people think about the area.

What's more, it could be a forerunner for the way the state designs and maintains highway beautification projects in the future, according to the Department of Transportation's chief of landscaping services.

The $4.25 million project to plant hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs along the highway median from the town center to Waipahu High School has returned a bit of greenery — and optimism — to a once-proud community that had fallen on hard times.

"For a while, Waipahu became a place that people just rushed to pass through," said Darrlyn Bunda, executive director of the Waipahu Community Association. "Before, there was nothing along the highway but a chain-link fence. Now, there are trees and shrubs and grass all along the way and it's become a source of pride. Now, we feel a little more like other communities around the island."

Waipahu was once a plantation town filled with green backyards and tree-lined streets. Over the years, the town changed: Apartments sprang up, strip malls moved in, planning was mostly absent and "everything got concreted over," Bunda said.

When the town's sugar mill closed and then was demolished in 1998, community leaders decided they had to do something big to get the town back on track. One of the ideas they came up with was landscaping the highway median, which up to then had been mostly marked by brown weeds and a chain-link fence meant to discourage pedestrians from trying a risky run across the six-lane highway to catch a bus.

Seven years later, the fence is still there, but hundreds of spreading yellow hibiscus and other shrubs are gradually overtaking it. Palm trees divide the road, and there's an irrigated strip of grass and wedelia ground cover running for more than 2 miles through the center of Waipahu's commercial district.

The landscaping project was recently given a Betty Crocker landscaping award of excellence by the beautification group Scenic Hawaii. The awards are named for the former president of the organization, a longtime champion of preserving and improving Hawai'i's green places.

"The main idea is to break up the asphalt," said Chris Dacus, the DOT official who oversaw the project. "The median is what's closest to the driver, so you try to concentrate the plantings there, where they'll be noticed the most."

Trees and other greenery haven't always been a priority at DOT, however, and Dacus said his projects still compete for money with sometimes more pressing concerns, including improved safety and reduced congestion.

On the job for about 18 months, Dacus has tried to see that highway landscaping projects give the department and taxpayer the "biggest bang for the bucks."

In short, keep it simple. Trees, for instance, offer a dramatic aesthetic improvement with a minimum of maintenance costs, he said.

With the success of the Waipahu project, DOT officials are also moving to make sure that highway maintenance across the state is done consistently, he said. That effort includes a complete rewrite of landscaping and maintenance specifications for contractors who do most of the work, including everything from mowing to pruning to picking up garbage.

"The difference is we're making sure that every item in a contract is tightly defined, and we'll also strengthen our enforcement to deal with problems that arise," he said.

Next up, the state plans to repave the entire stretch of highway from Old Fort Weaver Road to Kamehameha Highway. Work on the repaving contract, estimated to cost between $6 million and $7 million, is set to begin sometime next year, DOT spokesman Scott Ishikawa said.

Meanwhile, Dacus said, the Waipahu landscaping continues to win praise. Several businesses along the corridor have started their own private landscaping improvements.

"It just shows you what a big impact even simple movements can make on a landscape, especially where so many people use these roads for so many hours a day. The drivers see it every day and really get a lot out of it. It definitely doesn't go unnoticed," said Jason Umemoto, a landscape architect who heads Scenic Highway's Nimitz Beautification Committee, which has been working for more than a decade to improve the landscaping in the Nimitz Highway corridor.

Dacus said improving the aesthetic quality of the drives along H-1 Freeway and Nimitz Highway between Honolulu International Airport and Waikiki is one of his top priorities.

"If I could do that before I retired, I'd be a very happy man," he said.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.