Following a three-week public poll, the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation says it has counted the votes that have decidedly picked one day out of the week to close a popular Windward Oahu destination.
With 3,472 votes cast, Ho‘omaluhia Botanical Garden at 45-680 Luluku Road in Kaneohe will be closed every Thursday beginning
Jan. 8, DPR states.
City officials say that in the post-pandemic era the number of guests to Ho‘omaluhia — which in the Hawaiian language translates to “a peaceful refuge” — skyrocketed to a point where the garden itself needed peace and refuge.
As part of the poll, participants were given the choice of whether to close the botanical garden every Tuesday or Thursday. With 76% in favor of Thursday, and 24% for Tuesday the decision was confirmed.
The online poll closed at
5 p.m. Wednesday.
“Mahalo to everyone who participated in this survey to give our beloved Ho‘omaluhia a day of rest,” Honolulu Botanical Garden Director Joshlyn Sand said in a statement. “Through the process we also gained lots of other valuable insight from the neighboring community on their experiences with the botanical garden, including the impact garden visitors and their vehicles have on the opala pick-up for residents on Luluku Road.”
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“Closing on Thursdays will help ensure garbage collectors can regularly access their bins, reinforcing the benefits of providing the garden with a day of rest on this day,” Sand said. “The whole survey and planning process was a great exercise in public collaboration, and we greatly appreciate the public’s participation and understanding of the reasons why this natural treasure needs more time to recuperate every week.”
Spanning 400 acres at the base of the sheer Koolau Mountains, Ho‘omaluhia is the City and County of Honolulu’s most popular botanical garden. The lush, tranquil site also hosts a variety of activities including camping and fishing, DPR said.
Opened in 1982, Ho‘omaluhia was created in conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1978, with a previously developed 1974 master plan estimating a carrying capacity of 600,000 visitors each year.
But in 2024 alone, 650,882 visits occurred at the garden — a nearly 236% jump from the 193,996 visits in all of 2015, city data indicates.
And over the past decade, Ho‘omaluhia has seen a steady increase in attendance, particularly over the past several years during and after the COVID-19
pandemic, DPR said.
This continuous increase recently culminated with 723,495 visits tallied at the botanical garden from July 2024 through June 2025.
With the one-day-a-week closure every Thursday, the garden’s natural environment will be given more time to rejuvenate. It will also give the staff an opportunity to conduct much-needed maintenance and recreational programming improvements without disruption.
The city-run garden — open 363 days a year — is only closed on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
During a Sept. 15 news conference, Sand noted the garden’s roadways — specifically, a section of Luluku Road that narrowly winds and rolls through Ho‘omaluhia as the main route of entry and exit to the garden — are in need of maintenance.
According to Sand, her agency’s current expense budget, which also includes Foster, Lili‘uokalani, Koko Crater and Wahiawa botanical gardens, amounts to about $1.4 million annually. A large percentage of that funding is dedicated to security.
“The most expensive of our five gardens for security is Ho‘omaluhia,” Sand said. “So we have $1.4 million, about $700,000 of that is just for security.”
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