In 1976, a Pulitzer-winning poet moved from New York to Maui; he helped turn 19 degraded acres into a rare palm forest

In 1976, poet W.S. Merwin arrived on Maui and saw a landscape scarred by decades of agricultural use. What began as a small experiment in restoring the degraded land soon turned into a 19-acre palm forest containing hundreds of species. Merwin, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1971, worked alongside his wife Paula for more than 40 years; they planted trees, improved the depleted soil, and created what is now regarded as one of the world’s iconic private palm collections. According to the Merwin Conservancy, the property was once agricultural land that was severely degraded by erosion and intensive farming, an area larger than Rhode Island.

Transformation from damaged landscape into a living forest

Merwin’s relationship with the landscape began after he moved to Maui from New York in 1976. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin records that the poet initially arrived to study Zen with Robert Aitken and soon became interested in restoring the landscape on the island’s north shore. Records suggest that in 1977, Merwin purchased the first three acres and almost immediately began planting. Over the following decades, he steadily acquired adjoining parcels of the degraded valley, expanding the estate to its final 19-acre footprint, as he realized the microclimate required a larger contiguous canopy to successfully thrive. However, with the land being affected by generations of extractive agriculture, the soil was too depleted for many of the native trees he had initially hoped to reintroduce.


According to Merwin’s own account, he began growing palm trees from the seeds he obtained through botanical gardens and other seed distributors around the world, thus raising seedlings before planting them on the property. His wife, Paula, joined him on his journey as they attempted to improve the soil with compost and manure and carried water to young palms until they could survive on rainfall. The Pulitzer winner’s early personal estimates put the number of palm species planted at about 850, with over 700 initially believed to have survived.

Why this private collection became scientifically important

This Maui collection was more than an unusually large private garden; experts at the National Tropical Botanical Garden viewed it as a genetic safety net for palm diversity. While it lacked the funding and infrastructure of state-backed academic networks, the plot achieved a level of density that rivalled global institutions. For context, a 2001 peer-reviewed study in Biological Conservation examined 35 institutional botanic-garden collections across 20 countries and observed that those vast networks together held 902 palm species. That a single private citizen could independently cultivate nearly half that diversity on a residential plot highlighted the exceptional nature of his project.

It is worth noting that Merwin’s collection also included rare and endangered palms, which gave the garden’s conservation a scientific impact beyond its aesthetic appeal. The Merwin Conservancy has noted that subsequent botanical audits refined these numbers, showing that the property eventually contained more than 3,000 individual palms representing more than 480 taxonomically verified species, including those endemic and endangered varieties. Botanists like Bill Baker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recognised the significance and described the garden as having an exceptional conservation value.

The collection’s importance was also tied to the diversity of material preserved in one place. The International Union for Conservation had identified increasing pressure on natural resources as a serious challenge to palm biodiversity long ago. Its conservation action plan for palms called for targeted measures to protect threatened species and emphasised the importance of conserving palms both in their native habitats and through contemporary ex-situ collections. Therefore, Merwin’s garden became an unusual private example of how a cultivated collection could contribute to the broader conservation attempt to preserve plant diversity.

Merwin and his wife Paula established The Merwin Conservancy in 2010 to safeguard the property and its botanical legacy. In 2014, the landscape received permanent protection through a conservation easement held by the Hawaii Land Trust. Paula died in 2017, while Merwin continued working and living in Hawaiʻi until he died in 2019. The Conservancy now manages the property as protected land, preserving the garden and home where the poet spent more than four decades restoring the once-degraded land.

Merwin’s achievement linked two seemingly different forms of preservation: poetry and horticulture. The poet spent decades writing about nature while physically restoring a piece of damaged land. Today, the forest he created is a successful example of restoration instead of just being remembered as a garden of a celebrated poet.