Canoe Crops
Across
- 3. a wild ginger whose cone-shaped flower head oozes a shampoo-like liquid
- 4. a hollow-stemmed grass used to make knives and stamps for tattooing kapa cloth
- 7. a small leafy plant eaten as a peppery green, similar to watercress
- 9. a tree with round nuts pressed for scented oil, and hard shells strung into lei
- 11. a vine with an edible underground tuber, the most prized yam of old Hawaiʻi
- 12. a bitter yam eaten only when nothing else was left
- 13. a coastal tree prized for its beautifully grained wood, carved into bowls
- 15. a vine with an edible tuber, whose leaves are also cooked as greens
- 16. a coastal tree with orange trumpet-shaped flowers, its wood favored for carved bowls
- 17. a plant with a tuber that yields a fine white starch, once used to stiffen kapa cloth
- 18. a ginger relative whose bright orange root was used to dye cloth and cleanse in ceremony
- 19. a tree whose oily nuts were strung and burned as candles, and are Hawaiʻi's official state tree
- 20. a tree with a pungent, lumpy fruit valued more for medicine than for taste
- 21. a palm whose nut can float across an ocean and still sprout
Down
- 1. a shrub whose inner bark is beaten into Hawaiʻi's traditional barkcloth
- 2. a shrub crushed and released into tide pools to stun fish without poisoning the meat
- 4. ʻai, a tree bearing a crisp, watery fruit shaped almost like a bell
- 5. a vine bearing a hard-shelled gourd, dried and turned into drums, containers, and hula implements
- 6. a five-leafed vine with a tuber grown as backup food during lean times
- 8. a tree bearing a starchy, potato-like fruit that can feed a family from one tree for decades
- 9. a tall grass chewed for its sweet juice, source of sugar
- 10. a giant herb bearing curved fruit, sacred enough that women were once forbidden to eat some varieties
- 12. a hibiscus relative whose light wood was carved into canoe outriggers and fire-starting sticks
- 14. a shrub whose root is pounded into a drink that numbs the tongue and relaxes the body
- 15. a giant-leafed plant eaten only in famine, since its raw form can sting the throat
- 16. a plant with a starchy underground stem pounded into poi, considered an ancestor in Hawaiian tradition
- 19. a shrub whose leaves wrap food for cooking and were once believed to ward off evil spirits