THYME TRAVELER: Always Take The Scenic Route
- k-england
- Feb 28
- 4 min read
By Karen England, for Let’s Talk Plants! March 2025.
The Thyme Traveler columns are about the herbs and gardens I’ve discovered growing beyond my own home and garden. Whether I’m walking the dog on my own street or have flown fourteen hours across the globe to a foreign land, I find herbs growing along my travels and share them in these articles.
I have a life motto, found in a Mary Engelbreit 1999 day-to-day calendar, that simply says,
“Always take the Scenic Route.”
Over the years, now faded and tattered, the original calendar tearaway sheet has lived, tacked to the inside of the driver’s visor of my last four cars, inspiring me, even on my way home, to take the scenic route.
Yes, if you aren’t careful, this idea can make you late (in my case, later than usual), or get you lost, but it can also find you new vistas, and help you discover great things right in your own backyard.
I apply my motto to walking, not just to driving, but the same care, if not more, should be given when taking the scenic route on foot. Once, in 2004, while strolling along a side street in Galway, Ireland window shopping, aka the scenic route for shoppers, I got lost on my way back to my Bed and Breakfast. I mixed up the inn’s name and got directions home from a shopkeeper to the incorrect accommodations across town in the opposite direction and learned a valuable lesson that keeps my motto in check, which is to KNOW the name of where you are staying BEFORE heading out.
While on a Hawaiian vacation in 2013 traveling with cousins and staying for the first time in their regularly visited timeshare, just by taking the scenic route back from dinner on foot while the others drove the mile home, I discovered the most amazing, hidden from street view, orchid garden, with literally 1000’s of orchids in full bloom growing in large landscaped lava rock beds with benches and meandering paths made for enjoying both the floral beauty and the magnificent sunsets because all were situated within a stone’s throw of the ocean.
Did You Know?
Orchids are herbs. The flowers are edible, the ubiquitous vanilla bean comes from an orchid plant and differing parts of some orchids have been used for centuries by some cultures as medicine.
The next day, I made my family walk with me, no cars allowed, just the short distance off one of our hotel parking lots into a place of utter beauty that they had never seen in all their years of staying, sometimes a month at a time, in the orchid garden’s figurative backyard. To this day whenever they host new friends and family to their timeshare one of the very first things they show to their guests is the orchid garden while strolling, not driving, to dinner.
What Had I Found?
The Moir Garden - A Spectacular Botanical Park in Poipu, Kauai.
“The Moir Garden is a 35-acre botanical garden located within the Outrigger Kiahuna Plantation in Poipu, Kauai. The gardens date back to the 1930s and were created by Alexandra Moir, wife of Hector Moir, who was then manager of the nearby Koloa Plantation, Hawaii's first sugar plantation.
Because of the dry climate in Poipu, Alexandra Moir realized that most tropical plants will not thrive in the area. She decided to fill her gardens instead with cacti and succulents, as these plants flourish in such dry conditions.
The garden, also called Pa'u a Laka (meaning ‘skirt of laka’ and named after the Hawaiian goddess of hula), were initially intended for the personal use of the Moirs. After a few years since their creation, the Moir Garden started to be recognized and was even identified as ‘one of the ten best cactus and succulent gardens in the world,’ alongside other world-renowned gardens such as the Huntington Gardens and the Royal Gardens of Monaco.
In 1954, the Moir's opened the garden to the public. Apart from rare cactus and succulent species, the gardens also feature a wide variety of orchids, bromeliads and trees that require very little rain to survive.
There are also native Hawaiian plants such as wiliwili, hau, coconut and plumeria, as well as foreign species collected by William Whitmore Goodall Moir (Alexandra's brother-in-law) during his travels abroad.
Other attractions in the Moir Garden are the numerous lava rock ponds filled with Japanese koi and water lilies. The paved paths are perfect for romantic strolls before or after dinner at the Plantation Gardens Restaurant, housed within the Moirs' historic plantation estate home.
The Moir Gardens are located at 2253 Poipu Road in Poipu, Kauai. They are open daily with free admission.”
By always taking the scenic route on my way home from wherever I’ve been, I can chart the growth of lovely trees that I see regularly, or see the foal of someone’s horse frolicking in a paddock, I find new restaurants, gardens, parks, nurseries, stores, wineries, potteries and more...
... for me, the scenic route, when always taken, is magic.
Comments