The color of the limu was most striking to me. It is ʻula, a Hawaiian red of sorts, but it appeared ʻulamākuʻe (magenta) to my modern eyes. My great grandparents were traditional Hawaiian medicinal healers and I learned many things from plants and their relatives. ʻUlamākuʻe reminded me of the Hawaiʻi endemic fern, mākuʻe, which has a similar blade shape. The mākuʻe fern is not red, but this connection allowed me to see the ancient understandings within our creation story, Kumulipo, in which Hawaiian cosmology includes a series of births that occur in pairs with one organism birthed in the sea and the other on land. Usually the two share similarities in their names. This allowed me to explore my knowledge about other plants that have shared characteristics with this limu and along this retracing of what I was taught, I came across the lama, a Hawaiʻi endemic tree found in dry and mesic forests as high as 4,000 feet on most of our high islands. The young leaves can be red, magenta, pink, and even orange. Within this name, we also find connections to a specific design on a mat from Niʻihau, an island closely connected to Papahānaumokuākea.
