Robert Silva walked along the Pali Highway, a papale niu, a coconut frond hat he wove himself, crowning his head. Garden tools in one hand and kalo (taro) stems in another, he was on the hunt for a specific patch of grass, one that he'd been watching for years as he drove on his daily commute. Even on sunny days, part of the curb remained wet. "There's a spring," he says. "And there's a lot of water. It's not a trickle." Older maps, Silva says, show Mo'ole Stream running right through where the Pali Highway is today.
The kalo Silva planted took root. Dark green, heart-shaped leaves unfurled. But municipal forces worked against Silva's guerrilla farming: Road crews indiscriminately weed-whacked the kalo. With increasing frequency, police pulled Silva over for questioning.
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Guerrilla farmer Robert Silva plants kalo (taro) in parks, under bridges, along highways—wherever there’s wai (water). “Always thinking of another place to plant,” he says. At right, Silva examines a kalo corm after harvest. At left, papyrus grows among kalo at Nalo Kalo, a loi kalo (taro patch) Silva planted in Waimanalo, Oahu.
Silva and a dedicated group of volunteers have transformed Loi Kalo Mini Park into an urban oasis of Hawaiian medicinal and edible plants. (BELOW) Silva and two of his children, Trista and Robbie, relax after harvesting at Nalo Kalo.
"What are you doing over here?" they would ask.
"Oh, I needed my bucket," Silva would say, pretending a bucket had fallen out of his truck. Silva grew kalo on the highway median for almost a year in 2019 before turning his attention to other kalo farming projects on public land. The Pali Highway kalo disappeared beneath the weeds.
For Hawaiians, kalo is more than a staple food. In Hawaiian mythology the first kalo plant, Haloanakalaukapalili, is the elder brother of Haloa, the progenitor of the Hawaiian people. Like rice paddies in Asia, irrigated pond fields of precolonial Hawaii, called loi, produced enough kalo to feed the hundreds of thousands of Native Hawaiians living in the Islands.
"Kalo has always been part of our family," Silva says. His grandfathers worked as cooks and made Hawaiian food in imu (underground ovens). As Silva grew up, the family patriarchs maintained a loi at their Kaneohe home. Without a natural spring, the family irrigated their loi with soapy water from the washing machine. Seeing his grandfathers' backyard farm planted a seed in Silva's mind. "Always thinking of another place to plant," he says. "Especially if there's water somewhere, you know? Aia i hea ka wai a Kane? Where is the water of Kane? If there's water there, we've gotta plant some kalo."
Silva specializes in transforming neglected places. He turned a spring-fed patch of weeds near the Waikiki Shell parking lot into a small loi. When his eldest daughter, Trista, started softball practice in Manoa Valley District Park, he cleared a mountain stream behind the park's tennis courts, replacing invasive California grass with kalo. An assistant professor of automotive technology at Honolulu Community College with a background in ethnobotany, Silva has added intrepid kalo farmer to his resume in the last decade.
"This is not my day job. This is just a dream job," he says. "My two true loves is to malama da aina [care for the land] that surrounds us and to fix the cars that pollute it."
When Silva first came to Loi Kalo Mini Park in 2015, he pulled trash and weeds out of the dirt. Now on the first Saturday of every month, Silva and a group of dedicated volunteers plant, harvest and process pounds of kalo. “Building that pilina [connection], working with everyone, making new friends,” says Silva, “that’s the good part about it.” (BELOW) Robbie skims duckweed at Loi Kalo Mini Park.
At 8 a.m. on the first Saturday of June, Silva stands by the water's edge at Loi Kalo Mini Park, a once neglected city park that he's transformed into an urban grove of Hawaiian medicinal and edible plants. His well-worn reef walkers are zipped up his calf; one zipper sags from overuse. His signature handmade papale niu covers his head. About thirty volunteers join him in a pavilion at Loi Kalo Mini Park, hidden down an alleyway behind a Buddhist temple and a Mexican restaurant. Cars and mopeds hum in the background. Above the traffic noise, there is a chime of crickets and chirping birds. Silva describes the park as an oasis in a concrete jungle.
"This place is called Niuhelewai," he tells the volunteers. The place-name ("coconut going in water") is written across his shirt, which he designed. Above the text are drawings of skyscrapers, Honolulu's famous Kawaiahao Church, the state Capitol and, in the center of the cityscape, a towering kalo plant. When Silva first came to the park in 2015, he says, weeds covered a large, spring-fed pond at its center. "So I walked from this side to that side without touching water. It was just a big mat of California grass on top of the water." Silva hacked away at the thick grass with a chain saw and machete until he exposed the water beneath.
In one corner of the park, he moved a stone and water started flowing out of the ground. Two to three months later, kalo started growing. "It just started growing out of nowhere," he says. "It's been here longer than me. It's not the greatest kalo." His three children in tow, Silva started sectioning the pond's edges into gardens, or mala. When he noticed wet patches in the dirt, he dug until he found a spring. Over the years, volunteers have unearthed bric-a-brac: old plates. A cassette tape. A computer motherboard. Bikes and a scooter. Beer cans. A crack pipe. "Just not a body yet, thankfully," says Silva's son Robbie.
Volunteers at Loi Kalo Mini Park remove the corm and leaves from freshly harvested kalo. Silva brings luau stew, made from kalo, to share with the volunteers every first Saturday. “We reap what we sow,” he says. (BELOW) A volunteer works at Loi Kalo Mini Park in Kalihi, an industrial area of Honolulu not far from the state’s largest airport and harbor.
Today more than two dozen mala dot the park. During a monthly tour that kicks off the community workday, Silva points out the more than twenty strains of kalo growing. This leaf is sagittate, that one is ovate. Some kalo stems are light green, others a dark magenta. "They all taste different," he says. The urban farm has become so productive that Silva now has more kalo stems than he has space to plant them.
On a Wednesday afternoon, the sun bathes the town of Waimanalo in golden light before slipping behind the Koolau range. Silva parks his truck next to a bridge that runs over an unlined canal less than five minutes from his house. Trista and Robbie jump out of the truck bed.
"This is kind of like his COVID loi," Trista explains. "He was bored during COVID. He was like, 'You know what? There's water under this bridge. Let's just build a lo'i.'"
Trista had her doubts. She remembers looking at the solid mound of dry dirt under the bridge, hospitable only to weeds. The stream ran down only one side of the bed. "Where are you going to put this loi?" she asked him.
Armed with pickaxes and shovels, Silva and his children moved stones and dirt to create an auwai-an irrigation ditch directing water from the existing stream toward the pile of dirt. From that auwai, they created a network of small canals, turning a large pile of mostly dry dirt into small patches of mud. "It's about the water. Because when the water mixes, then it becomes the mud. Then it becomes good for the taro," Trista says. Silva calls it the "flowation sensation." Irrigation completed, the family planted surplus kalo stems from Loi Kalo Mini Park. A new loi, called Nalo Kalo, was born. Two years after planting, this year will see the first harvest, with another harvest every month.
Silva and his children sink their bare feet in mud, bend over and pull kalo. Their hands, invisible under the mud, search for the plant's bulbous corm. The corm is cooked, then pounded to make poi. They gently twist the plant's corm to snap the roots off without breaking the kalo. "Wigglation sensation," Silva says of the movement.
Robert, his 13-year-old son Robbie and daughter Trista, seen above at Nalo Kalo, are both invested in perpetuating the tradition to which their father has dedicated half of his life (the other half serving as an assistant professor of automotive technology at Honolulu Community College). Trista helps out on her summer break from college in England, but when she returns, she says, “Every chance I get I teach people the actual culture of [Hawai‘i].”
Kalo is not planted from seed. Instead, the corm and leaves, both edible, are cut from the stem. The stem is replanted, and from it, a new corm, leaves and smaller kalo plants-keiki-emerge. Keiki means both child and the shoot of a plant in Hawaiian. "This is all from one plant," Silva says, his arm full of keiki kalo. "You know, these all started as little tiny guys, so every year they get bigger." Thus the Hawaiian proverb "I maikai ke kalo i ka oha," meaning the goodness of the kalo is judged by the offspring it produces. It's a common refrain for Silva. "The strength of our race is in our keiki," he says. "It's what we pass on to the next generation. ... Just like my boy. I drag him around. I no care if he no like do 'um."
Trista and her father have matching kalo tattoos. Trista's is on her ankle. Silva got his just high enough to be seen above his reef walkers. At 13, Robbie will have to wait a few more years before getting his.
"You gotta take me to the gym," Robbie tells his older sister as they work in a loi at Nalo Kalo. "Who else is going to take me to the gym? Dad? No, Dad is going to say, 'No, you don't need gym. You need to go lift rock at the loi.'"
Trista and Robbie haul kalo in Waimanalo.
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Caring for a modern lo‘i involves weeding—and a lot of it. Volunteers of all ages keep the invasive California grass, which once covered the entire park, in check.
Harvesting complete, Trista and Robbie add streaks of mud, like war paint, to their faces. Robbie puffs up his chest for a photo. "Flexation sensation!" Silva calls to his son. Every semester, the students in Robert Silva's automotive class at Honolulu Community College repurpose used car parts to create something new. Nuts and bolts hang from fishing line to create wind chimes. Compression springs painted white or black are the pawns on a handmade chessboard. The students have all semester to do the project, but they almost always wait until the last minute. This approach baffles Silva. A man with seemingly interminable energy, he is constantly creating. He finds use in things and in places that others neglect or see as trash.
Three lamps in his living room commemorate his interest in cars: He decoupaged the lampshades with images of vintage cars or car parts. Engine camshafts make the base of the lamps. One lamp sits on an end table Silva decorated with a mosaic butterfly. Using barbecue skewers, newspaper and posterboard, Silva created models of the kind of double-hulled canoes Polynesians sailed to the Hawaiian Islands more than a thousand years ago. Shoe polish gives the canoes a black shine. The boat's net, a hairnet. The smallest ship, around three inches long, sits displayed in a glass ball. Papale niu hang on the walls throughout his house. He usually has one on his head. "If anyone shows interest in it, he'll say, 'Do you want it?' and take it off his head," says Trista.
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(LEFT) Silva pounds cooked kalo into poi at Loi Kalo Mini Park. (RIGHT) Silva crafts ornate papale niu, or coconut frond hats, a skill he learned while in middle school.
Kalo plants lie on water flowing at Nalo Kalo, one of several lo‘i Silva currently maintains. At his home down the road, Silva grows about twenty varieties of kalo in fifty-gallon drums that flank his front door. One drum, he estimates, has around hundred stems. “They all taste different,” he says.
Silva learned ulana lau niu, weaving with coconut leaves, while in middle school at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's Laboratory School. Every week on the same day, the Hawaiian culture teacher's husband would come to the school. "He's one of the surf boys of Waikiki," Silva says. "He used to sit in the yard and just weave all the time. So I would just watch him, watch him. So one time I went ask him, 'Ho, uncle, you could show me how fo' make me one hat?'"
The man looked at Silva. "No," he said. Months passed. Silva continued watching the man weave. Then he had an idea.
"I wen' grab one leaf. Because he always wove on the same day. So I wen' bust out one piece of leaf, and I made one hat." Silva looked at the hat he'd made. "It was kind of ugly. It was kind of all bus' up."
The man looked at Silva, a boy with a crooked hat in his hand.
"OK," the man said. "Now I can teach you."
Today Silva can make a papale niu in twenty minutes. He sports Mad Hatter-style top hats adorned with small, coconut-leaf fish and birds that shoot out from the hat and dangle in front of his face; "boingies," Silva calls them.
"I say the more boingies, the better," he says.
Silva separates the huli, or stem, from the corm; the corm will be steamed and eaten or pounded into poi, while the huli will be replanted.
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(LEFT) A community workday at Loi Kalo Mini Park. (RIGHT) Volunteers enjoy the fruits of their labor at Loi Kalo Mini Park. Silva doesn’t sell his kalo; apart from feeding volunteers, Silva shares kalo with seniors and the houseless.
Stacks of hats reach six feet high in Silva's community college classroom. He has taught weaving at Honolulu's Bishop Museum, but like his own teacher, he is careful when people ask for a lesson: "I'm always skeptical of teaching people how to do this. It's like, are you doing this just because you like wear 'um today and you goin' throw them away? Or are you doing this because you want to learn how to do it so you can do it later and show somebody else?"
Silva calls his work in the mud "taropy," a portmanteau of taro and therapy. With every passing year, the fruits of his labor become more plentiful. Usually, he cooks the kalo he grows and feeds it to volunteers who work at Nalo Kalo and Loi Kalo Mini Park. "We reap what we sow," he says. Other times, the harvest is destined for seniors at Kawaiahao Church, where Silva sings in the choir. Once Nalo Kalo and his loi behind Manoa District Park are sufficiently productive, Silva hopes to offer the harvest to senior communities. In July, Silva served kalo to the community of houseless people camping near Nalo Kalo. They watch over Silva's streambed mala and even recently started growing kalo of their own downstream using stems Silva gave them-and so far at least, the weed whackers have left the kalo alone.
