Hawaiian symbols in our jewelry

The honu is the Hawaiian green sea turtle, and you may well see one in the water off Wailea. In Hawaiian belief it is one of the forms an ʻaumakua, a family's ancestral guardian, can take.

That bond belongs to particular families through their lineage. For most people a honu remembers the islands and the turtles they swam beside here.

Makau means fish hook. Hawaiians carved hooks from bone, shell, wood and stone, and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu holds thousands made between about the years 1000 and 1600.

In Hawaiian story the demigod Māui pulled the islands up from the sea with his hook, Manaiakalani.

Nalu is the Hawaiian word for a wave or surf. It also means to think something over.

Surfing, heʻe nalu or wave sliding, is a Hawaiian practice with deep roots, and in Hawaiian tradition the ocean is one of the forms of Kanaloa, god of the sea.

Humpback whales travel from Alaska to Hawaiian waters each winter to give birth and raise their calves, and the water off Wailea is part of their national marine sanctuary. NOAA says they are most common from January to March and gone by early May.

In Hawaiian tradition whales are among the forms of Kanaloa, and some families honor them as ʻaumākua.

Plumeria came to Hawaiʻi in 1860, brought from tropical America by the botanist William Hillebrand. It became one of the most-used lei flowers in the islands.

Because it arrived in the 1800s, it is not part of ancient Hawaiian tradition. For most visitors it is the scent and shape of a Hawaiian welcome.

Niu, the coconut palm, is one of the canoe plants the first Polynesian voyagers carried to Hawaiʻi. It gave them food, drinking water, rope, thatch and containers.

Maile is a native vine whose fragrant leaves and bark are twisted into an open lei. It is the lei of big occasions: weddings, graduations and openings. At a Hawaiian wedding the groom often wears one.

Hawaiʻi is a chain of eight main islands, and Maui is the second largest. An outline of the islands, or of Maui alone, is a way to carry the place home.

One Hawaiian tradition says the navigator Hawaiʻiloa named the island of Maui for his son, who was named for the demigod Māui.

Hawaiians named the pineapple hala kahiki, foreign hala. It reached the islands by 1813 and became the symbol of Hawaiʻi's plantation era in the 1900s.

Its meaning of welcome comes from colonial America and Britain, where the fruit was rare and costly.

Monstera came to Hawaiʻi as a garden plant from southern Mexico and Central America. It has no place in traditional Hawaiian culture.

It became an island look through aloha shirts and resort design, and people love it for exactly that.