Lyon Arboretum

Deep in Manoa Valley, this rainforest garden began in 1918 as a sugar planters' experiment: a Minnesota botanist named Harold Lyon was hired to find trees that could hold the eroding watershed together, and never stopped planting. The guide follows his decades-long obsession with rescuing rare species, the deal that handed the whole valley to the University of Hawaii for a single dollar, and the small sealed seismograph station on the trail that the staff still call haunted. Listen for the falls running somewhere ahead as you walk.