Kukui

Though I'd often eaten sashimi, poke was then completely new to me—delicious rubies of cubed fish dressed in light sesame oil, garnished with minced bits of reddish-brown seaweed and the ground centers of kukui nuts (see recipe, next page).

“We get so wrapped up in the lei thing,” Ms. Shibata said, noting that instead of that perishable adornment, children will create bracelets of nuts from the kukui, the Hawaiian state tree.

Passing through a grove of kukui trees, with their silver-gray leaves, and then through a valley, they would have reached sugarcane fields, their stalks as tall as a man and densely clumped together.