The plant bug bit Davis as a child, when he discovered the magic of rooting cuttings in water. Later, after college, he worked as an estate gardener in Montecito and Santa Barbara, stealing away on moonlit nights to peek into places like Lotusland, the renowned garden of Madame Ganna Walska with its pools of thunderously blooming lotus, Jurassic Jubaea palms, seemingly submarine Aloes, snaky Euphorbias, and other hallucinatory glories.

In San Francisco, he and best friend and partner Michael Postl, who died in 1993, established their interior plantscape company and began doing business with Bay Area interior designers and gaining notice in the broader public eye with exceptional installations at the early landscape garden shows at Fort Mason.

Together they purchased fallow property on the Big Island, named Hale Mohalu, and began clearing, pruning and planting. Today the garden is a muststop on international horticultural itineraries. Extraordinary palms, like the spiny stilt-rooted Verschaffeltia splendida and the bright red SealingWax palm, Cyrtostachys renda, thrive near massive Cycas circinalis cycads. Massive Monkeypod Pithecellobium saman trees hold high giant epiphytic Asplenium nidus ferns, and rescued Tillandsia bromeliads take on new life and potent color when exposed on the slate terrace to daily rainstorms and humid tropical sun. Dalbok’s orchids, such as Cattleyas, cling to nearby trunks and thrive with only the addition of infrequent fertilizer tablets.

Besides imparting sheer horticultural vividness, Dalbok takes great care in placing and composing the elements of the landscape. Rising up the driveway along the row of Alexandra palms, Archontophoenix alexandrae, a visitor sees a green swale, manicured against the rampant growth, over which tower giant bamboo and a massive Royal palm, Roystonea oleracea. In a closeup slide, Dalbok brings our eye to bees swarming its thousands of minute flowers.

Artifacts from Dalbok’s travels bring a serene cultural presence into the domestic zone of the rainforest property. Buddha sculptures, unusual ceramics, carved stone and wood figures, and select natural and rustic objects like nautilus shells and industrial glass discards merge with live plant materials to create a picture of the sybaritic tropical life. The scent of Pu’a Kenikeni Fagraea berteriana blossoms almost waft off the photographs.

On an oakstudded hill in Fairfax, his continental home, Dalbok creates a place similar in spirit to Hale Mohalu, but using distinct natural materials. Color and texture come from the succulent Aeoniums and Echeverias, dry-growing hardy palms like Brahea armata, the banana relative Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii,’ gold and green Bambusa multiplex ‘Alphonse Karr,’ as well as from the aquamarine swimming pool tiling and the ochre clay of Copper Canyon fermentation pots.

In this favored Sunset zone 16 spot, he is testing Beaucarnea recurvata, the ponytail plant, Caryota gigas, the Thai Giant Fishtail palm, and Guzmania bromeliads; neighbors have begun using flowering gingers, Hedychium gardnerianum, after seeing Dalbok’s hardy roadside bed in full odiferous bloom. A thatched Asian gate welcomes the visitor into the garden, and sets the tone for the cultural atmosphere within.