More shades of red blaze at the entrance to Enchanting Floral Garden than you’ll find on paint chart chips. Everything from hot pink through scarlet to magenta grows on bushes and plants at the eight-acre plot. Flowers are clustered by variety along a switchback path up a hillside and include bromeliads, orchids, plumeria and the tiny passion flower. A detour...

The most massive structure you’ve ever seen may be in Kahanu Garden, a National Tropical Botanical Garden. The Pi‘ilanihale heiau, an ancient Hawaiian temple, dwarfs everything around it. The huge lava rock platform looms over palms and garden plots reaching several stories high and covering an area larger than a football field. It’s only possible to see parts of it...

Kula, set in the cool sweet air of Haleakala foothills, is all about flowers and onions. Two of Maui’s botanical gardens are there — Enchanting Floral Gardens and Kula Botanical Garden. And between the gardens strung out on Kula and Haleakala Highway, you’ll find numerous flower stands where growers set out plate size protea and bird of paradise blossoms. Pick...

Every tropical plant that you’ve ever imagined grows at Kula Botanical Garden, a six-acre site set at a cool 3,300 feet in Upcountry. Maui’s oldest botanical garden blazes with bromeliads, orchids, birds of paradise and numerous varieties of ginger. Protea, the garden’s glory, may grow to the size of a dinner plate. There’s even a taboo garden with poisonous plants....

You’re aware of Molokai Plumerias long before you see it. The five-petaled blossoms perfume the air for hundreds of yards around the 10-acre spread. Sometimes called frangipani, the plumeria is especially fragrant at night when it attracts exotic moths. The plumerias you see at weddings in New York or Miami, are likely to come from here. And when you see...