A West Side orchid specialist brings an eclectic twist to the family business.
Early each morning, Jeremy Domingo heads west along back country roads before entering a large agricultural lot located halfway between the Pacific Ocean and the Waiʻanae Mountains. There, inside a nearly football fieldsized greenhouse, orchids of countless colors and configurations await his careful tending.
S & W Orchids’ two-acre nursery—started by Jeremy’s parents, Carmela and Stan Watanabe—grows an impressive amount of orchid flowers, as well as other curious plants, for retail markets and orchid enthusiasts on O‘ahu and beyond. The family-run business has deep roots.
“My parents experimented with propagating orchids in bottles at our home in Waipahu,” says Jeremy, of the nursery’s origin in 1990. “It’s a whole process—from germinating orchid seeds in flasks in a sterile environment to planting them a year later—and I think they really enjoyed the challenge.”
Jumping into a new trade was risky, but the Watanabes weren’t exactly starting from scratch. Carmela’s father, Yasuji Takasaki, was an orchid wizard of sorts, renowned for his Hawaiʻi Island farm, Carmela Orchids, started in 1960 on four acres at Hakalau Village in the Umauma district. A former cultivation supervisor at Hakalau Sugar Plantation, Takasaki and his wife, Mitsuko, raised Vanda Miss Joaquim orchids, prized for their stunning, speckled petals in shades of lavender—at one point harvesting 35,000 orchid blossoms a day to supply local lei makers. Gradually, the Takasakis transitioned to potted orchids with guidance from their two sons, Sheldon and Gerrit, who applied their knowledge from earning degrees in horticulture to breed and clone orchid plants in service of largescale production.
After high school, Jeremy helped his parents build out the S&W Orchids nursery in stages. He joined the business full time at age 21 and spent much of the year traveling to orchid trade shows. In the early days, the nursery’s key sales came from exporting orchids to the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico, with fringe income from selling to small shops around O‘ahu, such as Wally’s Garden Center and Longs Drugs.
As competition from overseas orchid superfarms forced many growers out of the market, S&W Orchids endured by adapting, with Jeremy driving day-today operations and Stan and Carmela serving as president and vice president, respectively. Today, the business relies on strong retail partnerships with highvolume, on-island retailers, including Costco, Walmart, and Home Depot. “After surviving 9/11, we decided to focus more on the local market,” Jeremy says. “I must have approached the big guys at the right time, because we got in. We’ve been very blessed to keep these relationships going.”
Today, the ever-popular phalaenopsis orchid, with its broad palette of bold colors and lengthy blooming periods, is S&W Orchids’ bread and butter. Jeremy also maintains a multifarious selection of dendrobium, oncidium, vanda, cattleya, and other genus types, often forging new hybrids in hopes of producing extraordinary montages of color, shape, and size. Though all orchids share the same floral structure of three outer sepals encircling three inner petals, wildly diverse species within the Orchidaceae family possess highly coveted traits—for instance, the bubblegum fragrance of the Encyclia radiata, the cascading orange blossoms of the Cattleya labiata (aka “Big Lip”), and the fuschia and banana-speckled flowers of the Blc. Waiʻanae Leopard hybrid.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Jeremy started collecting harderto- come-by niche plants, combing local nurseries and importing from faraway growers—both as a matter of curiosity and to satisfy the rising number of customer requests. His cadre of curious plants includes a remarkable array of monstera, tillandsia (air plants), and succulents such as aloe, gasteria (aloelike with long, pointy leaves), haworthia (small succulents), and echeveria (rosette shaped).
Among the abundance of captivating orchid images on S&W Orchids’ Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram accounts, Jeremy’s quirky and often humorous posts showcase his favorite unusual finds, such as a gigantic, 50-year-old Dendrochilum magnum (Orchid Dynasty), and an extremely rare, variegated Philodendron Golden Dragon with split-colored, dragonshaped leaves.
Carmela Orchids is still going strong in Hakalau, with Jeremy’s Uncle Sheldon at the helm, while Uncle Gerrit runs Hawaiʻi Hybrids, another orchid nursery in Hilo. Though his passion for plants continues to grow alongside his long hours spent every day at the nursery, Jeremy is careful not to overdo it: Other than a small succulent display in a rocky patch at the end of the driveway, the exterior of his Waipahu home is strictly cement and gravel. “I never take my work home with me,” he says with wry charm. “At the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is work in the yard.”