FA'AALA, SAVAII, SAMOA

 Fa'aala is a small village on the island of Savaii in Samoa.  (Often the name of the village is shortened to Fa'ala in daily usage.)  I was lucky enough to spend 4 nights in this village recently while on a two-week trip to Samoa and I thought I would put up a few garden related photos for you.  Remember that you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on one.

I lived a total of 9 years in Samoa during my younger life and Savaii has always been a special place for me.  Over the years I have traveled to maybe a dozen different Pacific Island nations and I still think Savaii is the most beautiful of the islands.  There are a few small beach type hotels on the island but I stayed in a lovely guest house in Fa'aala village where there is no sandy beach, but I could just relax and watch village life from my comfortable, cool and open walled house, by the round-the-island road.  The owners also own a farm, so the wonderful meals are from home grown produce and meat. The guest house is called Florence's Place and you can contact them through Facebook. Savaii is still waiting for the tourists to come back after all the covid shutdowns.

The guest house, Florence's Place, that I stayed at.

Samoans really go all out in having nice flower and shrub gardens around their homes.  Villages care how they look, and you will notice how neat the gardens and lawns are kept and how colorful the gardens are.  Is seemed that Savaii was especially big on new bright hybrid crotons which were just ablaze along the roads and wonderful when viewed from a local bus window.  Bromeliads have also become the latest craze in Samoa.  A few years ago, it was just a few ladies in the main town of Apia who were growing them.  Now they seem to be in every garden, often perched on tree fern trunks or in recycled rubber tire containers.  Savaii is rather volcanic, and it is interesting to see how gardeners use small volcanic rock rubble to mulch their gardens.....it should stop those roving chickens from scratching all the plants out too. Of course, it is not just ornamentals in the gardens but also fruit trees like breadfruit, papaya, bananas and citrus as well as things like sugar cane and lau pele.  Then there are the plots of taro that are mostly found up the farm access roads that lead into the hills. It really was lovely to wonder around in the cool of the evening to view the gardens and it is hard to choose which of my many photos I should put up here.

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Aloha