“On Maui, visiting a native forest is a rare experience,” says photographer Brendan George Ko, who splits his time between the island and Toronto. Years ago, on a hike through the alien forests on the dormant volcano Haleakalā (called alien due to the presence of non-native plants), Ko came across a panel that pictured Hawaii as it once was: lush with ancient ferns and Jurassic-size koa trees. “I never saw a place like it until I visited Puʻu Kukui,” he says.

Stretching from the Honokohau Stream to the peak of Mauna Kahalawai (West Maui Mountains), the Pu‘u Kukui Watershed Preserve holds sacred status for the native Kanaka ‘Ōiwi community and conservationists alike. As Maui’s first point of contact with the clouds, the preserve is one of the wettest places on earth and home to a plethora of endemic insects, birds and at least 36 species of rare plants. Yet as the preserve’s conservation director, Pomaika’i Kaniaupio-Crozier, shows Ko, in recent years rainfall has been plummeting.

The former love nest of D.T. Fleming, known for introducing the pineapple to West Maui, has been turned into a hub for the watershed crew’s conservation efforts. The dry patch between the preserve and Ka’anapali Beach reveals Maui’s drought zone. As legend goes, after facing rejection from a handsome warrior, the volcano goddess Pele turned him into the first of many ‘Ōhi‘a lehua trees on the mountain. Taking pity on him, the other gods turned his true love into the native tree’s red flowers. Pluck one, and it will rain.

Dedicated community members like Daniel Tanaka, one of the first conservationists to work the watershed, and his partner, Kala, a traditional voyager, safeguard the land and its history. “Their relationship is a marriage between land and sea,” says Ko. The daughter of a Pwo navigator, Kala learned to sail the ocean with only the wind, seas and stars as a map in a voyaging canoe made with koa trunks.

Koa and ’a’ali’i flowers are covered with pouches to capture seedlings, which are germinated in the baseyard before being planted in the forest up the mountain. “When I think of Pu‘u Kukui, I think of it as a time machine,” says Ko. “Unlike the illustration I saw in the alien forest on Haleakalā, this is a living and breathing place, a window into the past and keeper of so many species that could easily disappear forever.”