Plant Selection

Everything below is scoped to Hawaiʻi and other wet-tropical climates. That's a deliberate choice, not a limitation: this content is built from real, currently-producing plantings, and it's more useful to give you a genuinely accurate list for one climate than a vague one that tries to cover every climate at once. Coverage for other climates will be added once there's real planting experience behind it — not before.

Species by layer (wet-tropical / Hawaiʻi)

This list matches the seven-layer model from Design: The Layers & Guilds. It isn't exhaustive — it's a real, working starting point.

• Canopy: breadfruit (ʻulu), citrus, avocado, mango
• Understory: banana/plantain, papaya, coffee (in more shade, coffee edges into the shrub layer depending on spacing)
• Shrub: coffee, cacao (in wetter, warmer microclimates), pipturus (māmaki — also has understory uses)
• Herbaceous: ʻōlena (turmeric), ginger, pipinola/chayote as a sprawling herbaceous vine
• Root: kalo (taro) — the single most productive root crop in this climate for both food and cultural value; sweet potato also works here or in groundcover depending on how it's managed
• Groundcover: sweet potato, pinto peanut (a nitrogen-fixing groundcover), low herbs
• Vine: passionfruit (lilikoʻi), pipinola/chayote trained upward instead of left to sprawl

Two species — kalo and ʻōlena — are singled out deliberately: they're not theoretical picks, they're real crops currently producing on the South Kona reference site this content is drawn from, including a documented 130 lb ʻōlena harvest in a single season from one restoration plot.

Native vs. introduced

Both belong in a Hawaiʻi food forest, and the choice isn't ideological — it's functional:

• Native and Polynesian-introduced species (kalo, ʻulu, koa, māmaki) carry the deepest track record on these soils and the strongest cultural grounding. Koa in particular is also a canopy-layer nitrogen fixer, useful for what it does for the soil, not just what it produces directly.
• Later-introduced food species (citrus, coffee, mango, avocado) often fill productivity gaps — faster yields, different harvest seasons, crops that sell well at a farmers market or into a restaurant kitchen — that native species alone don't cover.

A well-designed guild usually has both. The question worth asking for every plant you're considering isn't "native or not" — it's "what is this doing for the guild it's going into, and does the site actually support it."

What not to plant — and what to clear first

Hawaiʻi has a long list of species that were once introduced deliberately and are now aggressively invasive. If any of these are already present on your site, clearing them is the actual first phase of the project, ahead of any planting:

• Guinea grass — fast-growing, outcompetes young plantings for light and water
• Maile pilau
• Cat's claw
• Christmas berry

These four are named specifically because they're real — all four were cleared from the South Kona reference site before kalo, ʻōlena, and koa went in. If your site has different invasive pressure, the principle is the same: identify what's already dominating the ground before you plan around it, because it will outcompete a young food forest planting if left in place.

All four of these carry a real hazard worth knowing before you clear them — Christmas berry's sap, cat's claw's thorns, and guinea grass and maile pilau's fire risk once cut and dried. See Growing Safely.

Matching selection to your guild plan

Go back to the guild sketch from Design: The Layers & Guilds and slot real species into each layer using the list above. The next question — what the soil and water situation needs to look like to actually support this planting — is covered in Soil, Water & Establishment.