Onomea Bioreserve Big Island Ceramic Art Tile
— — a rainforest that runs down to the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A pocket of Hāmākua coast about seven miles north of Hilo, where Onomea and Alakahi streams drop off Mauna Kea and the rainforest runs all the way down to the bay. The garden Dan Lutkenhouse cut from impenetrable jungle in the late 1970s, foot by foot, sits inside that valley now: boardwalks under ginger and heliconia, an orchid house, a small waterfall, an ocean overlook where the old sea arch used to be before the '56 quake took it. The trade wind comes up the valley most afternoons. Quiet that the road above does not reach.
Onomea Bioreserve Big Island Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Hawaii Tropical Bioreserve & Garden occupies a seventeen-acre fold in Onomea Valley, about seven miles north of Hilo on the Big Island's Hāmākua Coast. The valley was cut by the Onomea and Alakahi streams as they drop off Mauna Kea, with the lower section emptying into a small Pacific bay once known as Kahaliʻi. A boardwalk leads down from the visitor centre at the top of the slope through rainforest canopy, past Onomea Falls and an orchid collection of more than 270 species, to an overlook above the water. The garden is reached from State Route 19 via a four-mile scenic detour on the Old Māmalahoa Highway, signed as the Pepeʻekeo Scenic Drive.
Onomea Bay sits at the foot of the valley where two streams from Mauna Kea reach the sea. For most of the twentieth century the most photographed feature on this coast was the Onomea Arch, a wave-cut sea bridge that stood thousands of years before a 1956 earthquake brought it down. The point where it once stood is still the trail's quiet ending; the ocean works on the same lava cliffs below. Onomea Falls, a smaller waterfall on the upper grounds, never dries; tropical rain along this stretch of coast averages more than 200 inches per year, over five times the U.S. national mean.
The garden is open to the public daily and is the only public access into Onomea Valley apart from the Donkey Trail that drops down from the road above. The site sits on the Pepeʻekeo Scenic Drive, a four-mile detour off Highway 19 about seven miles north of Hilo, rejoining the highway near Papaikou. The boardwalk loop runs roughly three quarters of a mile with a steep grade; sturdy shoes are sensible and the canopy keeps the path damp. The property has been held as a nonprofit nature preserve since it opened in 1984, seven years after Dan Lutkenhouse began clearing the valley by hand.