WAILUKU, Maui » The cooler temperatures have been good for Leona Rocha Wilson’s poinsettias, which in the last two weeks have come into full, bright-red bloom across her nearly 6-acre property at the top of Wailuku Heights.
She estimates she has planted between 800 and 1,000 poinsettias — most of them gathered from the graves at nearby Maui Memorial Park.
The vivacious 76-year-old didn’t plan on filling large sections of the south-facing slope with the plants, which are native to Mexico. But while driving past the cemetery at Christmastime four years ago, her natural curiosity led her to wonder what happens to all those potted plants adorning the grave sites once the holidays pass. So she called the cemetery and was told they would be cleared and discarded the day after New Year’s.
Rocha Wilson wouldn’t hear of it and got permission to collect them for replanting, enlisting a team of relatives to meet her at the cemetery at 8 a.m. Jan. 2. Together they carted off the plants in three pickup trucks and have returned every year since to repeat the ritual. Now hotels and churches call her to salvage their wilting decorations.
The festive plants remind Rocha Wilson of her late sister, Eleanor Watanabe, who was widely known on Maui as "the Christmas tree lady." Watanabe kept 20 decorated trees in her Wailuku Heights home year-round until she died in 2007 at the age of 81.
"I thought to myself as I planted them, ‘I’m going to call this (section) Eleanor’s Garden,’" Rocha Wilson recalls.
The poinsettias are just one way she has used her splendid estate to draw her family close since moving back to Maui in 2006 after an unexpected career in the home-sewing and fashion industry that took her from a Hamakuapoko plantation camp to the highest circles of New York society and commerce.
Every Monday, Rocha Wilson hosts an informal potluck lunch in her elegant yet welcoming home — a mansion, really — that draws a lively crowd of family members and dear friends. Regulars include her sisters, Patsy Shishido and Lavina Rocha Silva, and her brother Leroy Rocha and his wife, Frances — all in their 80s. The conversation is spirited and the laughter loud as the sassy siblings share family news and trade good-natured barbs.
"We’re all talkers," jokes Rocha Wilson. "And we need listeners — we’re Portuguese."
She promptly informs newcomers of the house rule for the weekly get-togethers:"You have two choices: You can do two hours of work in the garden, or you can bring something everyone can enjoy."
Even those who contribute to the meal often find themselves later kneeling in the greenery, weeding, pruning or adding new plants. A gardener comes three days a week, but there’s far more to do outdoors than he can handle alone.
"The pleasure of working the soil and being in touch with nature … nature’s got it, you know. It’s the kind of thing, without trying to sound corny, that brings you back to real, whatever real is to you.
"For me, this is real," she says, gesturing to her surroundings.
LONARIDGE, as Rocha Wilson calls the $6 million property, was an undeveloped, forested tract on steep terrain at the 1,200-foot elevation of the West Maui Mountains, facing east toward Haleakala, when she and husband William P. Wilson bought the parcel in 2007.
"I was motivated by the view. I fell in love, and you’re not always rational when you fall in love," she says.
It took two years just to prepare the land for construction of the grounds and 10,000-square-foot home. The back side of Rocha Wilson’s home opens to a rectangular swimming pool and a broad lawn that stretches about 175 yards out to a promontory. At the edge of the lookout are two rustic log chairs from which to survey the breathtaking bicoastal view.
While the design and construction of Lona Ridge was done at great expense and with exhaustive planning, the garden had a more impromptu beginning, taking root in cuttings Rocha Wilson collected from friends and family and throwaways like the poinsettias.
Growing in a circular planter at the porte-cochere is a thick mat of baby’s tear she started from a handful of stems brought back from Honolulu in a Ziploc sandwich bag. The blooming hydrangeas growing amid the bright-green ground cover are from St. Theresa’s Church in Kihei, where her nephew, Terrence Watanabe, is monsignor.
Lining the walkway to the front entrance of the home are anthuriums from Eleanor’s yard, and the yellow-flowering gazania that covers the 25-foot-high slope where the ridge was cut away originated from the grounds of St. Joseph Church in Makawao.
Clearly, Rocha Wilson can afford an army of landscape architects and gardeners to achieve Versailles-like grandeur, but she prefers her hand-me-down landscape. It’s a point of pride, in fact.
"A gardener will say, ‘Let me try this plant here and see how it works’ — and I’m a gardener," she insists with a warm grin, leaning in and gently grasping the reporter’s forearm to make the point — a gesture that becomes familiar as Rocha Wilson speaks lovingly of her home, her life and her family.
"If you can’t afford it, ask your neighbor, ‘Can I have a piece of that?’ Then put it in a pot and see if it will grow for you. It’s amazing what you can do with free stuff."
ROCHAWILSONprefers going barefoot when she strolls the property — it gives her better footing, she explains, even in the steep and muddy sections. Carefully inching her way down the edge of the back lawn toward a clump of pili grass, Rocha Wilson grabs a handful of dry, wiry blades. After returning to level ground, she picks out a single strand that is the thickness of a cat’s whisker, runs it across her tongue and places it in her open palm. The grass begins to corkscrew forward like a burrowing worm.
"It’s a seed; it’s how it survives," she says. "Nature is amazing, isn’t it? I love it!"
Lona Ridge is a showcase for native plants such as olulu, palapalai and hapuu ferns, dry-land taro, mamaki, alahee and ohia lehua. It is also a farm for the 300 koaie trees — a smaller variety of acacia — and three sandalwoods Rocha Wilson planted on the south-facing slopes along with the poinsettia and a haphazard mix of tropical foliage and fruit trees.
She is happy to provide informal tours to visitors and small school groups. "I’m so fortunate to live here and to take care of this place and to share it. Something this beautiful, you can’t keep it to yourself," she said.
While showing guests around, Rocha Wilson brings out koa boxes to help explain how early Hawaiians used native flora. One box holds braided cording made from uki uki, a native member of the lily family, and the plant’s berries, which made blue dye. Another box contains the woolly fiber from hapuu fern that was used during embalming and for stuffing pillows and mattresses.
(On display in the foyer is her father’s kaukau tin from the plantation. "Iwant to show the children they can dream. I came from the camp, but with a lot of hard work, a lot of mentors and a lot of luck, I have this wonderful property.")
She also shares Lona Ridge with Anna Hakes, of Waikapu, the daughter of an acquaintance, who asked to set up a beehive as a family project. Once a month, Hakes and her four children, ages 3 to 11, trudge up the slope at the front of Rocha Wilson’s home to check the hive, which hosts as many as 20,000 bees.
Hakes expects her first honey harvest of 45 gallons in February.
ON AMORE personal level, the evolution of Lona Ridge over the past six years was a way for Rocha Wilson to reconnect with her family after an adventurous and far-ranging career on the mainland.
"Because I needed help, this garden brought us all together," she says.
The youngest of six siblings, Rocha Wilson left Maui in 1955 to join the Army. Under the GI Bill, she enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York where she studied pattern-making and design. She went on to invent the "fashion ruler," a revolutionary tool that allows home sewers to alter patterns to fit their own curves.
She started her own business and traveled the country teaching women how use her tools. Simplicity, the sewing pattern company, took note of Rocha Wilson’s success and winning personality, and asked her to host a television show aimed at home sewers. Like so many of the other opportunities that have propelled her life, it was an unexpected and fortuitous turn.
"My mom used to say, ‘Go try. What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ Smartest woman I know," she says.
"The Sewing Show" aired two years in the early ’80s on the cable network later known as Lifetime, and afterward Rocha Wilson became a lobbyist for the fashion industry’s "Made in USA" campaign.
She married Wilson, president and CEO of the Butterick Publishing Co., which produces patterns under the Butterick and Vogue brands, in 1987. He died in 2010.
"When I left, my dream was to come back home, and that house represents my coming back home. But it was coming back home for a reason, not to build this house, but to be with family and to have friends," Rocha Wilson said.
"And the fact that I need help? What are family and friends for if you can’t ask them to work?"
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For more information on Lona Ridge, visit www.LonaRidge.com or email Leona Rocha Wilson at LonaRidgeMauiHi@gmail.com.
