ULA, Maui— Ruth Osborn, of Dustin, Texas, couldn't stop taking pictures. Standing on a gravel path overlooking the terraced expanse of Ali'i Kula Lavender and the isthmus of Maui below, she was, she said, "in purple heaven."Osborn has an expansive garden at home and was already planning to research whether lavender might grow where she lives.

Thelma Miyashiro, of O'ahu, isn't a gardener, but her husband loves to putter in the yard. So when she visited Maui and saw the sign for Enchanted Floral Gardens, she just had to stop. "My husband would be disappointed if I didn't take some pictures and look around and tell him about it. I saw some things here I've never seen in my life," said the 57-year-old, who was on the Valley Isle visiting family.

While Hawai'i might not be quite as garden-proud as, say, the Deep South, where formal public gardens and garden tours are a regular feature, Maui's Upcountry, home to several public gardens as well as commercial gardening operations that welcome visitors, is proof that people here have some interest in what comes from the earth.

And it's not only gardeners who are interested. Photo hobbyist Ka'ena Chang, of O'ahu, made a special trip up to Kula during a Maui jauntto visit the Kula Botanical Gardens. Chang is making a series of photos of native plants, and the 36-year-old garden has a good collection of these.

"I found several things I didn't have (pictures of)," he said, back on O'ahu. "Besides, gardens are just healing places, peaceful places. I'd hang out in a garden even if I wasn't making pictures."

O'O FARM

A different but no less visually striking garden experience is provided by O'o Farm, where you not only get to look but touch, too. The farm was founded about seven years ago by chef James McDonald and partners Louis Coulombe and Stephan Bel-Roberts of Pacific'O and i'o restaurants in Lahaina as a sort of private pantry for the restaurants, a place of retreat for restaurant staff.

Every Thursday, up to 20 visitors — mostly locals but with a smattering of tourists — are greeted with warm apple cider and fresh-baked pastries and led on a tour of this 8-acre vegetable plot and fruit orchard on a back road in Kula, harvesting greens and herbs and picking fruit as they go. This bounty, they turn in at the indoor-outdoor kitchen equipped with a gas stove, smoker and wood-burning rotisseries. There, chefs from the restaurants prepare a lunch fit for a fine-dining clientele — except in this case the backdrop is rolling hills, Maui's central isthmus and the West Maui Mountains.

A recent menu featured whole, roasted papio in foil with lemongrass, Tahitian lime, olive oil and herbs picked on the site, kiawe-grilled beef tenderloins with stir-fried veggies, also picked minutes before cooking, a hearty vegetable soup, a mesclun salad with feta cheese and balsamic liliko'i vinaigrette. Dessert was fresh-picked loquats, which are in season right now, and i'o's famous chocolate pate. Guests may bring their own wine to accompany the meal — perhaps something from Tedeschi Vineyards, nearby in 'Ulupalakua.

"Guests are welcome to come into the kitchen and help with the prep, washing vegetables, maybe a little chopping," McDonald said. Or they can contemplate the view while the meal is prepared. The lunch is served in a rustic open-air roofed pavilion covered with climbing vines.

"The garden looks fabulous. We had some slow-down due to that heavy period of rains, but right now, it is producing beautifully. We have loquats in bloom right now. The beets are always there, fennel is coming in. Depending on what time of year you visit, you never know what is going to be available," said McDonald, who shares tour hosting with other chefs and with farm manager Richard Clark.

They've even hosted some celebrity chefs at the farm, which provides about 60 percent of the produce used in the restaurants.

ALI'I KULA LAVENDER

Ellen Furtado just couldn't get over it. "In all my years of living here, I never saw lavender, I never heard of lavender growing here. Now all of a sudden, look at this," said Furtado, of Kahului, who was visiting Ali'i Gardens in Kula with her daughter-in-law. "It smells so good."

Furtado, 65, was having what garden owner Ali'i Chang likes to call "a lavender kind of day," enjoying a light tea and then a walk around the grounds and a visit to the farm's charming gift shop.

Despite its relative youth, Ali'i Gardens (aka Ali'i Kula Lavender) is arguably the best-known and most visited of Upcountry public gardens. The 8-plus-acre property is home to more than 40,000 lavender plants, as well as protea, hydrangea, bromeliads and many other plants — and, like most of the other gardens, it has a heart-stopping view down the hill.

Perched at the 4,000-foot level at the very end of rural Waipoli Road, the gardens offer perfect growing conditions for lavender: cool days; cooler nights; not a huge amount of rainfall. More than 40 of lavender's 200 varieties are grown here. When you drive up, go slow, you'll be winding through a cow pasture and Bossy just might wander into your path.

Like Furtado, Chang, then a protea grower, was unaware of lavender's potential in Kula until he was given a plant as a gift. He was impressed by how swiftly and well it grew. When he began collecting lavender plants in the late 1990s, there wasn't another lavender garden in Hawai'i, and few people here knew how to use it. In 2002, he opened the garden to the public and it was a definite, "if you build it, they will come" moment.

A shrewd businessman, Chang and his research and development staff have diversified the business so that value-added products help support the growing operation and so that visitors get a multifaceted experience — eating, walking and that all-important shopping, plus crafting, as well. Their holiday wreath-making classes sell out ever year.

Their shop sells products they have developed with other Maui businesses — goat's milk-lavender soap with goat's milk from Surfing Goat Dairy, down

Oma'opio Road, for example. There's lavender-chocolate sauce, lavender-liliko'i jam, a lavender herb and salt rub that's sensational with lamb and many beauty and bath products.

But perhaps the best thing to do at Ali'i Gardens is to find a chair on the gift-shop deck or a bench in the gardens and just sit and smell the lavender. Rub a sprig between your hands, breathe deeply and let your eyes wander to the view. Stress relief is said to be one of lavender's strongest properties.

ENCHANTING FLORAL GARDENS

Though the least-well-kept of the four gardens we visited, Enchanting Floral Gardens, on eight acres at the 2,500 foot level, does live up to its name.

Strolling the curving pathways, disappearing into the dimness of vine-covered tunnels, climbing the terraced stairs to a gazebo viewpoint, you do experience a sort of enchantment, losing your daily cares in oohs and aahs as you encounter plants you've never seen before.

It starts at the very beginning, when — having passed through gift shop and paid your entrance fee — you're greeted by a shower of ghostly white angel's trumpet flowers and then, in sharp contrast, the startling crimson of the leer rubra, whose flowers hang upside down in great clusters, glowing in the dimness of the archway upon which the vines are trained. It's very quiet in the gardens, and rather dreamy.

Enchanting Floral Gardens is for sale and shows signs of neglect — missing or broken plant identification signs, the gift shop looking as though no one had bought anything there for some time, and flower beds that need cleaning and weeding — but it remains an interesting place, particularly for gardeners, since there are more than 2,000 species. It's also fun to roll the flower names around in your mouth: White shrimp plant, blue potato bush, cup of gold, Justicea aurea, Begonia odorata.

The gorgeous, symmetrical passion flowers were in bloom and nearby was a sign that explained the symbolism given to this plant in Christian mythology: three stigma stand for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; the center pistol is the hammer used to nail Jesus to the cross and the stamen and anthers are the thorns used to crown him; the five petals and five sepals are the Ten Commandments.

There are benches, two gazebos and picnic tables on the property, for resting and snacking. Walking the entire route takes about

45 minutes at a strolling pace.

KULA BOTANICAL GARDENS

Warren McCord didn't plan to create a botanical garden back in 1967 when he jumped a fence in a Kula pasture and stumbled on a piece of paradise — a miniature canyon with human-scale waterfalls and rock outcroppings. "It was like nothing I've ever found on the island," said McCord, then a landscape architect in private practice on Maui, looking for property on which to plant a demonstration garden for his clients.

The ravine was on ranch land owned by Oskie Rice, and he didn't generally sell his ranch land. But when the McCords told him their plans, he got interested and agreed to sell them eight acres. Later, he would sell them nine more, on which the McCords cultivate Christmas trees that help finance their labor of love, the demonstration garden that became an exceptional botanical collection.

Between 1968 an 1971, the McCords planned and planted, with many of the materials coming from private gardens. People would hear about the work and call and ask if he wanted this or that. "Even if I already had it, I'd say 'yes' and go and see and it always turned out that they had something else that I did want." He used the garden as planned, to show clients, and also sold plants. But so many people wanted to visit that, in 1971, they built a gift shop and opened to the public.

Today, the garden, which is at 3,300 feet of elevation, is a multifaceted experience with more than 2,500 species of plants, all labeled, plus a number of attractions that make it family friendly and a sought-after wedding site. There are two gazebos, a picnic area and the gift and snack shop. Pathways that allow stroller and wheelchair access wander through the grounds.

And there's the view. Store manager Cathy Holmes enthuses, "You can see both Ma'alaea Harbor and Kahului Harbor and the West Maui Mountains. I watch the rain dance across the valleys and I see rainbows all the time."

There are four main plant collections: a hodgepodge of plants that grow well in the Kula area, 60 varieties of protea, an orchid group, and native plants. The latter, McCord said, "took a long time to develop. Natives were not popular back in the 1970s and nobody was worrying about invasive species. We are still finding and planting natives that we never knew existed."

Along the way, Kula Botanical Gardens became something of an adoption agency for unwanted animals, too. They have a bird sanctuary that is home to two large African crowned cranes that used to live at the Westin Resort, and a caged aviary with donated lovebirds and doves and the only two nene on public display in the county. And there's a koi pond and an enclosure for Jackson chameleons.

McCord, now retired, says the garden has never made any money; every penny they make goes back into buying plants and paying staff. But the Christmas tree operation does well, and now son Jeffrey McCord is taking over management so Warren and Helen McCord can spend their time with their beloved plants.

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.