Proto Polynesian: *Puka
REFLEXES IN SOME POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES:
Tongan: Puko (Pisonia grandis, Nyctagynaceae and Hernandia nymphaeifolia, "Lantern tree", Hernandiaceae).
Niuean: Puka tea (Pisonia grandis, Nyctagynaceae).
Samoan: Pu'a (Hernandia nymphaeifolia, "Chinese lantern tree", Hernandiaceae; Pu'a vai, Pisonia grandis, Nyctagynaceae).
Tikopia: Puka (Hernandia nymphaeifolia, "Lantern tree", Hernandiaceae).
Marquesan: Puka (Hernandia nukuhivensis, Hernandiaceae).
Tahitian: [Pua manini [not cognate; see text below] (Passiflora foetida "love-in-a-mist", Passifloraceae).
Tuamotuan: Puka (Pisonia grandis, Nyctagynaceae).
Rarotongan: Puka (Hernandia nymphaeifolia "Chinese lantern tree ", Hernandiaceae; Pisonia grandis [a.k.a Puka tea], Nyctagynaceae).
Maori: Puka (Meryta sinclairii, "Puka", Araliaceae; Griselinia lucida "Puka, akapuka, pukatea, akakōpuka", Griseliniaceae; Syzygium maire "Swamp Maire", Myrtaceae; Muhlenbeckia australis "Large-leaved Muhlenbeckia ", Polygonaceae). Puka is also an alternative name for the introduced wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, Cruciferae, also known as nanī, rearea, hāria, nīko and paea.
Kāpuka (Griselinia littoralis, "Kapuka, Broadleaf ", Griseliniaceae).
Pukapuka (Brachyglottis repanda, "Rangiora", Asteraceae).
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This name appears to have started off in Northern New Guinea as a generic term used to denote a select group of large-leaved littoral trees
in the absence of a more specific name, especially Pisonia grandis, Ceodes umbellifera, and Gyrocarpus americanus. In various languages it has usually retained this function, while often at the same time becoming a primary name for a particular species. As the Austronesians moved further into the Pacific, Hernandia nymphaeifolia was added to the mix, along with Guioa rhoifolia in Fiji, and in tropical Polynesia Pisonia grandis and Hernandia nymphaeifolia have become the most frequent inheritors of this name.
Three of the major plants to acquire Proto-Oceanic name or refexes of it have been discussed in other contexts and information can be found about them there: Guioa rhoifolia on the page for *Taputoki, Pisonia grandis on the page for *Puka-tea, and Ceodes umbellifera on the page for *~para. This page is devoted to the three others, Hernandia nymphaeifolia, Gyrocarpus americanus, and Passiflora foetida. There are two "Odd men out" among the six species: Guioa rhoifolia has narrow, lance-shaped leaves, quite different from the other "Buka" mokopuna, and the Passiflora is a very recent arrival in Polynesia, definitely not a tree, but which possibly owes its inclusion in this family to the shape of its leaves, although more probably because of errors in the transcription of its name. Each of these latter two species is known in Polynesia by a name linked to *buka in only one or two locations.
Puka as Hernandia nymphaeifolia.
Hernandia nymphaeifolia is an evergreen tree occuring naturally from East Africa to Polynesia except Hawai'i, the Marquesas and Aotearoa. The tree is found throughout the tropics in coastal areas and littoral forests, and also in coastal swamps. It grows from 5 to 22m high, with woolly oval or semicircular leaves with a palm-like arrangement of the veins. It bears white or greenish fragrant flowers in clusters of three all year round. The leaves are arranged in spirals, and peltate, i.e. attached to the stalks on the underside rather than the margins (in the manner of the way a Roman shield, peltatus, was held). The male flowers have three white petals and the females four. Flowers of one sex will open in the morning, and the other in the afternoon -- the timing of the sequence varies from tree to tree. The fruit is a waxy red or white berry about 3 cm long, each bearing a single seed.
Its light wood is not very durable, but is used for fish-net floats, fishing rods, furniture and firewood. In Samoa, Rarotonga and Tahiti it is one of the trees used for making the hulls of dugout canoes (paopao in Samoa), although those made from other wood will last longer. The seeds are surrounded by a woody layer which in Tahiti, Samoa and elsewhere is polished and strung into neclaces; in Rarotonga they may also be used as decorative hatbands as well as in leis and dancing skirts. Art Whistler (Plants in Samoan Culture, p. 142) reports that in Samoa the seeds were also used for playing marbles. The smooth-barked trunk is used for hourglass drums in New Britain. The flowers are used to treat asthma on Waya Island, Fiji, and an infusion of the crushed bark is occasionally used for treating post-partum sickness in Samoa.
Puka as Gyrocarpus americanus
This tree is now rare throughout it Polynesian range (W. A. Whistler, Flora of Samoa, p. 308), although it is indigenous from Tonga to Tahiti. Its natural range stretches from Africa through Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Northern Australia, through (mostly Western) Polynesia to Central and South America.
The tree grows from 12-18 m high, and is found in dry, lowland forests and grassland; it does not thrive in areas of high rainfall. Its large, heart-shaped leaves are spirally arranged, generally crowded towards the ends of the branches. They are glossy-green above, with yellowish veins, and measure about 15 cm long by 12 cm wide. The tree sheds most of its leaves before flowering. The flowers are green to yellowish green, with a fragrance designed to attract certain insects rather than people. Male and bisexual flowers may be found on the same flowerheads. The fruit (illustrated in the gallery below) is a seed-case attached to "wings" which can be carried considerable distances by the wind.
The bark is silver-grey or gold, and the sap may be toxic. The soft, light wood is used for making catamarans in India and canoes in Tonga, and in some places boxes, toys or firewood, but these uses seem very localized. When the tree, known there as vili or moa, was more common in Samoa, the winged fruit was thrown up in the air by children to spin (vili) and flutter down like a chicken (moa). According to the Gymnocarpus page on Brian Kane's Nature Website (see "Further information" section, below), the tree is very common in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, and a favourite roosting place for birds. The leaves are often devoured by caterpillars, leaving the tree stripped bare outside the flowering season. Aboriginal people there use the golden bark to make containers and shields. The leaves are used in a cure for rheumatism. The cambium layer also makes an effective poultice for skin infections.
Despite its attractiveness, the tree is rarely cultivated; however it is an important revegetation tree in Australia's Northern Territory.
Puka (possibly, but probably not) as Passiflora foetida
 Passiflora foetida is a recent, and in most locations probably accidental, introduction to Polynesia from its native habitat in the drier regions in the American tropics. It was first recorded in Hawai'i in 1871, and had spread to the Cook Islands by the 1920s. According to one authoritative account (a personal communication from the Molecular Chemist and Ethno-botanist Jean-Francois Butaud to Art Whistler, recorded in the Annotated List of Tahitian Plant Names, p. 77) the Tahitian name for this "weed of recent introduction" originated in the Marquesas. However, it is not entirely clear what the name of the plant in Tahiti actually was. In the Whistler List it is written as Pua manini, without the glottal stop between the vowels in Pua which would put it in the "Puka" family ("pua" is the word for "blossom" in Tahitian (and Māori), and also the name for a tree, Fagraea berteronana, known as Pua in many parts of Polynesia). The Rensch/Whistler Dictionary of Polynesian Plant Names records the local names for the passionfruit as koku, pu'a heahea, puka, pu'a moina, and puka heahea in the Marquesas, and puka and puka heahea in Tahiti, referencing Tiaredex (Index Botanique des Plantes de Polynesie Francais, a database of French Polynesian plant names, but now superseded by the Guides Floristiques mentioned in the "Further information" section below). The Lorence/Wagner Flora of the Marquesas Islands, however, gives the local names as papa-kakina, puku manini, puu manini, and puu moina. Pu'u "fruit" or "swelling" is a very different word from Puka. The list in the Flora is similar to that in the French Polynesian Chambre de l'Agriculture et de la Peche Lagonaire (CAPL) Catalogue des plantes melliferes de la Polynesie Francaise, which lists puku manini, puu manini for the Northern Marquesas, p'u mo'ina and papakaina for the South, and para [probably a reference to the Pisonia trees -- see link above] for the Windward Isles of Tahiti.
Jean-Francois Butaud has very kindly unravelled this confusion for us in a recent (29 August 2023) email. All the Tahitian names of Passiflora foetida have come from the Marquesas, and none reference pu'a or puka. Several of the names combine pu'u / puku "fruit" with an adjective (some Marquesan dialects replace /k/ with a glottal stop, and the Marquesan Academy does not write the glottal between identical vowels) -- for example, puku / pu'u / puu manini ("sweet fruit"). Koku is probably koko'u, actually the name for Solanum repandum, a relative of the poroporo with yellow edible fruit. "Heahea" could mean white, but it also means "stinky, bad smelling", which is an appropriate description of the leaves of the plant, known as kaheahea on the island of Ua Huka. The various names incorporating "puka" have probably come from sources where the transcribers had mistakenly written a final "a" instead of "u". Papakaina is a general name for fruits with shells which pop when trodden underfoot; the adjective mo'ina also probably reflects this, too -- a compound of mō, sound like a shot or crack, and 'ina little, small.
If puka (or pu'a) really had come into the mix, then it would probably have been a reference to the leaf shape. However, a similar feat of imagination may have reminded someone in the Tahitian Windward Isles of the shape of the leaves of the bird-catching trees which were once also grouped under the taxon *buka, as the CAPL Catalogue reports para as the name for the plant on the Iles du Vent. That, along with the puku/puka mixup in the linguistic and ethno-botanical accounts, provides the justification for including Passiflora foetida on this page.
The plant itself is a vine with leaf blades 2.3 - 7.2 cm long by 2-6 cm wide, tapering at the end. The leaf margins and stalks have sticky glandular hairs which give the plant a foetid odor. The flowers are 2.6 to 4.8 cm in diameter, with white petals and sepals and a white, lavender or purple corona. They are surrounded by sticky bracts which trap insects, maybe to protect the fruit. The yellow or red berries have a rather scanty quantity of sweet-tasting flesh and an abundant supply of seeds. The blossoms open in the morning and close about noon. The leaf tips may be edible but the larger leaves may contain high levels of cyanide, although in Vietnamese folk medicine a tea made from the dry leaves of this exotic plant is used to relieve sleeping problems.
In Hawai'i Passiflora foetida is common indisturbed sites, lava and rock outcrops, and sandy soils. It is naturalized in many Marquesan islands, and has made its way into many habitats from sea level to 600 m. It is not so common in the Cook Islands, where it is probably a more recent introduction. It seems to have arrived in Samoa around 1920, and is a weed of disturbed places there, too, from sea level to 850 m. Art Whistler (Flora, p. 442) notes "No uses reported, although children probably eat the tasty pulp of the small fruit". Birds also have a taste for the fruit, which would explain its rapid and wide distribution.
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