Q. How can I keep my dad's coconuts short and low enough for easy picking? We like to drink the juice for our health and eat and cook with the coconut meat.

— Kathy Largosa, Manoa

A. To keep coconuts short for easy picking, don't prune them.

It's really that simple. Only trim when you want to harvest coconuts and if the fronds are totally dead. A coconut palm, or niu to Hawaiians, is a beautiful tree when it is full of ripe and semi-ripe coconuts and all its fronds are intact. The nahenahe music of coconut fronds is unlike any other.

And now, modern nutritional science is proving to us that coconut is a healthy and refreshing thing to drink or eat. If you just prune off the coconuts, it will stay low and easy for even short girls like me to pick and eat.

You can also grow a short variety like the recognized and prized Samoan tree called niu afa, which we refer to simply as the "Samoan" coconut in Hawai'i. Coconuts do cross-pollinate and hybridize, so try and grow a niu afa from a nut collected within a grove of that variety.

If you want to have tall coconut palms, keep pruning them.

Cut off all the flowers and nuts and prune the fronds, and you will get tall coconuts rather quickly. We found this out by growing, transplanting and pruning our 1,500-plus coconuts at the Hale Koa Hotel.

I learned from the best, our lead tree trimmer Ino John Lee, who hails originally from Western Samoa.

What we also learned from Lee are the immune-building properties of green coconut juice. I noticed that he never got sick, and he drank lots of coconut juice. Research shows that the juice of green coconuts (the spoon-meat stage) has the same acid as human mother's milk.

Drink some fresh green coconut juice when you are on the verge of getting a sore throat or cold and you can sometimes cure yourself before you get sick. It works for me.

KEEP ALL PALMS SHORT AND FRUITFUL

This also holds true for other kinds of palms and even for flowering plants. Manila or Christmas palms and spider lilies are prime examples of this horticultural phenomenon. These palms are planted along Kalaniana'ole Highway. If the state would leave the flowers and fruit on the trees, it would save on maintenance fees. It would also keep the palms short and attractive with their green and red fruit (thus the name Christmas palm). Since the palms are in rock mulch, any fruit that drops is no problem.

For a while I thought the state was being very landscape-akamai. The flowers and fruits were left on. Then some genius cut them all off and they grew a few feet taller and more spindly. Recently, after visiting my sister, I noticed that the palms are in flower. If the state would just leave them alone, they would stay short and be a beautiful sight.

The same holds true with spider lilies. If you want them to stay short, compact and healthy, leave the flowers and fruit (which can be green or purple if they are the Queen Emma variety). If you want them to grow tall and gangly, cut away!

Fruit makes palms grow slower, so they are not only more beautiful, but safer as well.

Always learn from those you work with. We used to think that having coconuts was a waste. My dad used to say, "Isn't it a shame we have all these coconuts and nobody wants the nuts?"

Our yard was full of coconuts. There must have been more than 20 of them. My daddy used to trim them all, swaying in the breeze. Up in the high trees I would watch fearfully and worry about him when the trades hit the fronds. One was a super-tall 60-footer that my daddy would cling to, machete in hand as it swayed. He had some strong pecs then! My mom, so akamai, would just go in the house. Why did I have to watch? I had to keep him safe somehow by watching him, and I became an arborist myself!