Blog

Filoli’s Vegetable Garden is a space to share stories and connect through food. Since it reopened to the public in the summer of 2022, Filoli has partnered with members of the local community to highlight diverse Bay Area food traditions.

Loa Niumeitolu, a Tongan poet and farmer, organizes the Pasifika Planting @ Filoli Group. She shares about how caring for traditional crops has brought the community together and connected them to their history.

Loa Niumeitolu:

This is the second summer that the Pasifika Planting @ Filoli Group has planted a plot in the Vegetable Garden. The group includes Pacific Islanders of Micronesian, Melanesian, and Polynesian ancestries living in the Bay Area. We tend taro, sī plants, ginger, and other crops with important cooking and ceremonial uses in Pacific Islander cultures. 

Taro A nutritious food staple in the Pacific Islands, taro’s roots and leaves are used for everyday eating, in ceremonies, as medicinal treatments, and to regenerate the soil and ecosystems.

Sī Plant
Known as sī in Tongan and ti in Hawaiian, this plant is used by Pasifika people to create lei: offerings from the land to a person as a gift. Important ceremonies and sacred events feature regalia made from its leaves and stalks.

Many of the Pasifika members of the group were born in the U.S. and have never been to the Pasifika homelands. Many members have never seen or tasted a taro, let alone planted one. Participating allows Pasifika members who know nothing about this cultural staple to grow in their relationship with taro. We plant it as a seedling, harvest the leaves for dishes like laulau, lū, and palusami, and harvest the roots in fall to cook and eat. 

“My grandmother and my mother planted taro in Palau,” said Palauan member Windsor Taro while planting his first taro plant. “I just planted a taro plant here, and I feel very connected to my family and the land back in Palau.”

Our group is intergenerational, including students from the Pacific Islander Student Associations of San Francisco State University, nearby Stanford University, and as far away as students and their family members from UC Berkeley. 

At the group’s meet-up this past June, Leila Tamale, a masters student at Stanford, weeded the plot next to her mother, Valerie, and her sisters Samantha and Manon, while they all showed their young niece how to water the plants. Three generations together in the garden! 

San Mateo residents Sitiveni, who is Tongan, and his friend John, who is Kanaka Maōli, came to water the taro each day for the first month it was planted to make sure the taro would survive. “It’s like caring for our garden back in Tonga,” said Sitiveni, who came to the U.S. when he was a teenager. “It’s really good to care about the plants because it’s for our whole group.” 

Two sisters from Palau, Andrea and Alissa, donated ginger and taro plants at the group’s first 2024 planting day. They gift the group with knowledge and practices about plants and how to use them, especially to make lei. The members teach each other and everyone learns together!  

A typical day for the Pasifika Planting @ Filoli group includes: 

• Giving thanks to the Ramaytush, the Indigenous stewards of the land that Filoli is on;
• Everyone introducing themselves;
• Eating together;
• Then off to the plots to weed, plant, water, and harvest;
• Sitting under a beautiful Filoli tree on the fala (mat) and “talking story” – sharing personal stories about our life experiences to build trust, friendships, and community.

Each part of the planting day together is vital and feeds our relationship with each other. As recent immigrants and children of recent immigrants, there is a lot of trauma that members of the group experience. Our planting days at Filoli – through meeting our ancestral plants, learning from other Pasifika people, and sharing food and personal stories – provide members with a community to heal wounds of migration and from harsh conditions they experience here on this land. 

Planting our ancestral plants together and meeting each other and talking story gives us a belonging and a connection that is necessary for us to live full lives.

Want to hear more about the Pasifika Planting Group and their connections to the land? Loa Niumeitolu joined Filoli’s Morning in the Garden podcast to share about the project. Listen here.