The Rare Tiare Flower of Mount Temehani on Raiatea
From www.telegraph.co.uk/films/moana/tiare-flower-symbol-of-polynesia/
The tiare flower: the true symbol of Polynesia
A member of the tropical “campanulaceae” family, the tiare apetahi only grows on one island on the planet, the French Polynesian Leeward Island of Raiatea, and only grows there in one place, on the extinct volcano, Mount Temehani.
With distinctive white, five-petalled flowers shaped like a splayed hand, and a magical, heady scent, this flower has never been successfully cultivated anywhere else than on the slopes of Mount Temehani, to the continued bafflement of botanists.
The island of Raiatea was the ancient spiritual heart of Polynesia, which stretches across the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean to include Hawaii, Easter Island, Tahiti and even New Zealand. Raiatea translates as “faraway heaven” or “sky with soft light”, and is associated with many Polynesian legends. The legend of the apetahi flower is perhaps one of the most enduring.
Once there was a young girl of incomparable beauty, called Tiaitau. She became the lover of King Tamatoa, and when he and his warriors rowed away on their canoes to war, he asked her to wait for his return. She told him she would climb the sacred mountain, Temehani, to watch over the sea until he came back. She said that she would put a coconut in the chasm called Apo’o hihi ura.
The coconut would journey through the earth drift from island to island, following Tamatoa. Whenever he was thirsty, she told him, the coconut would be there, and when he put a hole in it and drank from it, tasting its sweet water on his lips, he would be kissing Tiaitau.
Tiaitau watched for the return of her lover from the top of Mount Temehani, but when she saw the flash of sunlight on his abandoned oar in the waves, and his empty canoe bobbing on the ocean, she plunged her arm in the ground in despair and broke it off, so that her arm would grow up as a plant and flower. If her lover did eventually return, he would smell her scent on the wind, and he could grasp the white flower which represented her hand.
Then she threw herself in the chasm of Apo’o hihi ura because she couldn’t bear to wait and be told for certain that her king, whom she adored so much, was dead.
The flower that grew where Tiaitau had planted her arm would never leave the sacred mountain, just as Tiaitau had never left it, and would never grow anywhere but there.
In other variations of the legend Tiaitau was a beautiful goddess and her lover was a fisherman, or perhaps the son of the king, but the story always ends in the same way, with her planting her arm in the sacred mountain of Temehani and the white-handed, aromatic flower growing from it.
Today there are estimated to be fewer than 500 plants left, by some estimates not more than 100, and they are heavily protected under local law. A single break at the apex of a stem can kill the whole plant, and anyone who picks, kills or attempts to transplant one risks a prison sentence and a fine of one million Pacific francs (approximately £80,000).
The tiare apetahi is the emblem of the island of Raiatea. The enduring legend of the beautiful Tiaitau, as well as the fact that the flower can only grow on the most sacred mountain of the most sacred island in the vast Polynesian archipelago, truly makes it a symbol of Polynesia.
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