As a youngster in South Kona, Mel Johansen remembers his "Uncle George" telling the story about the time he discovered a rare palm tree and saved it from a bulldozer.

Today, Johansen is dedicated to making sure that same critically endangered tree species, a previously unidentified Hawaiian loulu palm, has a chance of recovering.

Johansen is the manager of the Nature Conservancy’s Kona Hema Preserve in South Kona, where the species Pritchardia schattaueri — named for George Schattauer — is now thriving.

"It means a lot to me," said Johansen, who was born and raised near the preserve and was good friends with Schattauer’s son. "It’s very satisfying taking part in the project to ensure this species’ survival into the future."

A public-private partnership has coalesced to save the species, which was down to 12 individuals just 30 years ago, all of them growing on actor Jimmy Stewart’s ranch in South Kona.

Now there are more than 625 of the palms at Kona Hema Preserve, thanks to a collaboration between Schattauer, the Kona Palm Society, the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nature Conservancy.

While working as manager of Stewart’s ranch in 1960, Schattauer was overseeing the clearance of an area for pasture. That’s when a tractor driver spotted the tree and told him about it.

Deciding to take a closer look, Schattauer walked up to a towering tree that was well over 100 feet tall.

"He knew right away this was something different," Johansen said.

Schattauer called off the heavy machinery and later sent seeds to the Honolulu Botanical Garden, where scientists identified a new species of Pritchardia, Hawaii’s only palm genus.

Turns out the new species is Hawaii’s largest Pritchardia, capable of growing a foot per year up to 130 feet. Unique to South Kona, the tree also may live 200 years or more.

Schattauer made sure to protect the few trees on Stewart’s ranch, and the species eventually was named for Schattauer, who died in 2005. Today, it is a federally listed endangered species.

In 2001, the Kona Palm Society collected seeds from the same trees the rancher saved. The Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden helped ensure their propagation and a partnership formed between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nature Conservancy to reintroduce the seedlings at the Kona Hema Preserve, which is close to where the original trees were found and has the same climate and environmental conditions as the ranch.

Johansen described the tree’s recovery so far as "spectacular."

One of the reasons the palm tree is thriving in the 8,081-acre preserve is a fence that was put up around it, making the area inaccessible to pigs and goats that would devour and trample the palms. With the preserve free of hoofed marauders, conservationists witnessed an incredible planting success rate, with 95 percent of the trees surviving, holding on even through periods of drought to flourish in the forest, the manager said.

The Kona Hema stand of Pritchardia schattaueri has trees of various ages up to about 13 years, ranging in height from 3 to 13 feet. They share the protected landscape with hundreds of other native plants.

The genetic diversity of the remaining wild palms, Johansen said, is being guarded by carefully tracking which of the plantings come from which of the 12 original trees.

Pritchardia is the only palm native to Hawaii, where it once played a significant role in the native habitat and culture. Their seeds were the main food for the extinct Hawaiian honeycreeper ula-ai-hawane, whose name translates to "red bird that eats loulu fruit." The bird’s fate is thought to be tied to the decline of the palms. Ancient Hawaiians also ate the seeds and used their leaves for thatching.

There are a few Pritchardia species that exist on other Pacific islands, but the widest variety — more than 20 — is found in the Hawaiian archipelago. Species exist on most of the main islands, and a small forest is found on Nihoa, a small island at the southern end of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.