FORT COLLINS — Breadfruit trees have traveled far — first carried by Polynesians 4,400 miles across the Pacific to Hawaii from Papua New Guinea. Capt. William Bligh brought it to the Caribbean. But perhaps its most unlikely journey was to a greenhouse on the outskirts of Fort Collins.
The breadfruit cutting in a pot at Summit Plant Laboratories is a remnant of one of the trees on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where a 2023 wildfire killed at least 102 people, razed 2,200 homes and businesses, caused $5.5 billion in damages and wiped out the historic town of Lahaina.
If all goes well, the laboratory will use tissue culture technology to generate thousands of new breadfruit trees to send back to Maui. It is a departure for Summit, where the main work is using the technique to grow healthy seed potatoes.
“This is going to be very challenging,” said Jennifer Matsuura, the lab’s operations and special projects manager. “This is probably going to be a one-to-three-year process for us.”
A panoply of initiatives is underway to restore Lahaina, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and perhaps revive the land and traditions from before the whaling ships, the sugar plantations, the tourists and the fire came.
“We’re not going to go back to what was there 200 years ago, but there is a lot to learn from what was there 200 years ago in how we think about the future of this place,” said Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a University of Hawaii assistant professor of indigenous crops.
Breadfruit — “ulu” in Hawaiian — plays a big role in that thinking for a sprawling breadfruit forest once covered the west side of Maui. Lahaina, or Lele, was known as Malu ‘Ulu o Lele — “the shaded breadfruit grove of Lele.”
The ulu tree is a symbol of resilience in Hawaiian culture. When the fruit is baked or roasted it has the fragrance of bread. The sap can be used as an adhesive or to treat cuts. The leaves double as sandpaper and the wood can be fashioned into surf boards.
An ulu tree can grow up to 60-feet tall and yield as many as 250 football-sized, carbohydrate-rich fruits. It can now be found in about 80 countries from Costa Rica to Indonesia to India.
In 1789, Capt. Bligh tried to bring breadfruit to the Caribbean but mutineers on his ship the HMS Bounty jettisoned Bligh and the breadfruit trees. Four years later, Bligh did make it to the Caribbean with saplings.
How the cutting got to Fort Collins
The cutting in Fort Collins is one of several collected, before the fire, by Eddy Garcia, who runs a regenerative farming operation and an educational nonprofit promoting regenerative farming on Maui.
“For the last couple of years whenever trees were being trimmed, I’d collect material,” Garcia said, including from a few of the nine trees believed to be survivors of the ancient forest. “That’s what I sent them.”
Garcia’s goal is to replant the descendants of those ancestral trees on his properties — one of which was leveled by the wildfire — and offer them to anyone else who wants them. His plan is being aided by a $100,000 donor-directed grant from the Denver Foundation.
Seeking a partner, Garcia sent out emails to plant labs that specialize in tissue culture. Matsuura, whose family lives in Hawaii and whose grandfather was a county agriculture extension agent on the Big Island, or Hawaii Island, replied.
To send trees back to Garcia, Summit will have to solve a biological puzzle, Matsuura said. “There will be lab trials and research,” she said. The aspirational goal is to produce 10,000 saplings for Maui. A whole new breadfruit forest.
Before Europeans arrived in the late 18th century, the forests around Lahaina were filled with breadfruit, coconut and taro. The area was watered by 11 perennial streams and the land was lush.
A network of canals and engineered fish ponds around Lahaina led the captains of the European ships to call it the “Venice of the Pacific.”
Then the Pioneer Mill Co. arrived in 1860. “When the sugar cane industry came in, they forced the Hawaiians to chop down all the trees because they wanted to grow sugar cane,” Garcia said. “They filled in all the canals, drained the wetlands. They just decimated the area.”
A law was eventually passed to prevent cutting down breadfruit trees in Lahaina, but the plantations then piled sugar cane waste around the trees and burned them. “After three burnings the tree would die,” the University of Hawaii’s Lincoln said. “We really went down a bad path.”
By the time the sugar mill closed in 1999, the breadfruit forest was gone with only nine original trees left. The wetlands had been drained and the streams buried. The west side of Maui became hot and dry, and then the wildfire came.
Driven by high winds, the fire tore across 2,170 acres in the Lahaina area on Aug. 8, 2023, forcing 13,000 people to flee from their homes. (A total of 6,700 acres burned on the island in four fires.)
Garcia operates three farming sites devoted to traditional Polynesian crops like coconut, taro and sweet potato. His largest parcel — 30 acres — was hit hard by the fire. “We lost hundreds of breadfruit trees that were growing and maybe 50 animals — cattle, pigs and sheep,” Garcia said. “We were wiped out.”
A small part of a vast effort to restore breadfruit
Now the rebuilding begins. To be sure, Garcia’s is far from the only effort to restore breadfruit on Maui.
For a decade, the University of Hawaii has had a program supporting the development of breadfruit and other traditional crops. The Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Co-op promotes ulu production and sales across the islands. (You can buy the cooperative’s ulu pancake mix and Krunch Granola.)
The Breadfruit Institute, operated by the National Tropical Botanic Garden, has the world’s largest living collection of breadfruit with 150 varieties at its Kahanu Garden on Maui. The garden was untouched by the fire.
“There’s been a pretty steady movement to try to improve cultivation and usage of traditional crops, and breadfruit, specifically,” Lincoln said. “It is a way of improving food security and agricultural economies.”
Since the fire there has been a bigger push. A Maui-based, nonprofit Treecovery has announced the goal of planting tens of thousands of breadfruit trees on the island. The Lahaina Restoration Foundation, which is coordinating cleanup and managing historical sites, is working to preserve the nine ancient trees.
“There are a lot of perspectives,” Lincoln said, “and, you know, especially because with any disaster, there’s also a lot of money that comes in.”
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Garcia, who lives off the grid, has shied away from most of the breadfruit-related groups and activities. “Everyone is jumping on the breadfruit bandwagon,” he said. “I am staying out of the political realm. … We are just doing it ourselves.”
On the other hand, Garcia has been a vocal opponent of the plan for a temporary containment dump for ash and debris from the fire on the shore near his farm in Olowalu, about 6 miles from Lahaina. “It’s all just going to wash into the sea,” he said.
While the university and cooperative have been encouraging diversity in breadfruit varieties, members of Lahaina’s native Hawaiian community asked the university and the botanic garden to help them save and propagate the nine ancestral trees, all charred and denuded by the fire.
“I think it is the community putting a stake in the ground and elevating the value of what Lahaina used to be, before it was essentially, you know, colonized,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln and other researchers entered the still restricted burn zone and dug down below the scorched earth to remove sections of roots from each tree. The material was taken to the university’s laboratory in Hilo, on the Big Island, where researchers are already growing saplings.
The Hawaiian breadfruit tree does not produce seeds. Instead, its roots send out shoots. Researchers at the Hilo lab are replicating that with a technique called “adventitious shoot cuttings.” They take a, 2- to 3-foot chunk of root and scarify with a razor blade, causing the root to put out shoots.
When the shoots are 12 to 18 inches tall and woody, they are removed. The lab has been able to get shoots for seven of the nine trees. “With this method over the lifetime of the roots we’ll get hundreds of trees,” Lincoln said.
Garcia has cuttings, but no roots, so to produce new plants he and Matsuura are using tissue culture in which a small piece of the plant is used to grow plantlets in plastic containers in the lab using a sterile nutrient solution or medium.
“We have to start by sterilizing the material so that when we put it in culture, it is free from contamination. And so, that’s our first step,” Matsuura said. “It can be a bud, a shoot, a piece of a stem. … Then we will introduce it into our system and go from there.”
The first big challenge is to figure out the ideal growing medium for breadfruit. “We’ll have to do a bunch of different media trials,” she said, “because just like different plants in your garden need something different, breadfruit will have a different nutrient profile.”
For the plants that the lab has cultured, such as potatoes and mint, it takes about a month to root and Matsuura said a bit of that plant then can be used to make more plants, which in turn can be used to make more plants.
“With breadfruit, it could be a lot longer. We’re not sure,” Matsuura said. “Or it could be about the same.”
And setting up the in-lab generation isn’t a cinch.
“Sometimes we need to go back to the mother material, if something doesn’t work,” she said. “It usually takes a few tries to get them to work in the lab.”
Once the tissue culturing is working and plants are growing, Summit will have to work with the state to meet Hawaii’s strict protocols and certifications to allow the breadfruit saplings onto the island.
When breadfruit trees from the various efforts do start arriving back on the island, the hope is it will mark the beginning of a new chapter for Maui and Lahaina.“We’re going to rebuild Lahaina. Let’s build it, preserving Malu ‘Ulu o Lele,” Garcia said. “Let’s try to bring the wetlands back. Let’s try to change this town and give it back what it deserves as its place in history.”