Allerton Garden

Allerton Garden is not a place you stumble into. It sits in a valley near Lawa’i on the South Shore, behind a gate, accessible only on a guided tour run by the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and I’ll admit that requirement — book ahead, show up at the appointed time, follow a docent — initially struck me as excessive for what I assumed would be a nice collection of plants. It is not just a nice collection of plants.

An Heir’s Fantasy, Built Over Decades

The garden was shaped from the 1930s onward by Robert Allerton and his adopted son John Gregg Allerton, who spent decades sculpting a working sugar plantation valley into a series of outdoor rooms — fountains, statuary, water features, and enormous specimen trees arranged with the patience of people who had both money and time in equal supply. Our docent walked us through what she called “the Diana Fountain room” and “the mermaid fountain,” each a distinct garden space with its own mood, connected by paths shaded so completely that the temperature dropped noticeably as we moved between them.

The Trees From Jurassic Park

Fans of the original Jurassic Park will recognize the Moreton Bay fig trees near the garden’s edge — their massive above-ground roots, tall as a person, were used for a scene where the characters take shelter, and our docent pointed it out with the weary patience of someone who fields the question on every tour. Seeing the actual trees, absurdly large and genuinely strange-looking, made the movie reference feel almost beside the point. They’d be remarkable regardless of what film crew had once stood among them.

Lawa’i Bay, at the Garden’s Edge

The tour ends at a small, private beach at Lawa’i Bay, where the Allertons built a beach house that still stands. We weren’t allowed to swim, only to stand at the water’s edge for a few minutes before the tour moved on, and something about that brief, gated access to an otherwise inaccessible beach made it feel more valuable than an hour of unrestricted swimming somewhere more open would have.

When to go: Year-round by reservation only — tours run several times daily and often sell out days in advance in high season, so book before you land on the island rather than after.