“A Little Gardening” Over the Years Grows Into a Lush Sanctuary

As a Punahou parent in the late 1990s, Sheldon Nagata started buying plants from the school’s carnival. At the time, he knew nothing about gardening; he just wanted greenery to help fill in his yard, which was sprawling with weeds. Little did he know that his property would transform over the years into a stunning sanctuary of nature, and that tending to it would become his die-hard passion, a raison d’être.

Nagata, a senior account manager at ESPN Honolulu, gave me a tour of his place, which started inside his multilevel Punchbowl home. The view from most of the windows resembles paintings, an intentional detail. He framed each of the large panes “to bring the outside in,” he says.

I’ve personally known Nagata for more than a decade, yet I had no idea he loved growing things or was so thoughtful about nature until we spoke at a company function. He casually told me he “did a little gardening.” Intrigued, I soon learned that his “little gardening” was decades in the making, and that he had essentially created a green wonderland in his backyard with more than 100 different kinds of plants, flowers and trees—so much lushness I gasped when I saw it.

Nagata started gardening as a solo project, but the planting rose to another level in 2010. That’s when his son, Landon, back home from college for the summer, asked if he could work with him on the yard of a newly constructed second home on the property. Nagata was surprised. Landon had never expressed such interest before, so he embraced the chance to do something meaningful together. Over that summer, the pair spent hours together on their steep hillside property, their hands covered in dirt from shoveling, clearing away weeds and planting flowers and trees that would set down roots and eventually flourish.

Sheldon still talks about that summer fondly. And although he went back to tending to the yard by himself after his son returned to school, he cherishes what they did together, saying that’s when things “really started.” Through all this, Sheldon has developed a deep reverence for nature. No matter what the weather is, he never waters or fertilizes anything. Instead, he lets nature “do its thing.”

“Every day, I look at it, and I feel good about it,” he says. “I’ll have a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and I just stare at the outdoors, the plants and birds, and I think, this is nature, this is what God created.”