Leland Miyano

Leland Miyano is an artist, landscape designer and author born and raised in Hawai'i. He received his Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

His books include A Pocket Guide to Hawai'i's Flowers (Mutual, 1997), Hawai'i's Beautiful Trees, (Mutual, 1997) and with Douglas Peebles, Hawaii: A Floral Paradise (Mutual 1995).

In the field of landscape design, Miyano designed his own 1-acre (4,000 m²) Kahalu’u garden, featured in Martha Stewart Living, and some of the gardens at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. He is a protégé of internationally known Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx.

Miyano's work explores man's relationship to nature. Renowned artist Isamu Noguchi encouraged his stone sculpture work and led him from ceramics to the use of volcanic basalt from the local area. His series of large basalt sculptures grace the entrance of the Judiciary Building at Kapolei.

Miyano received the 2008 Catharine E. B. Cox Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts from the Honolulu Museum of Art, resulting in his one-person exhibition, Historia: Naturalia et Artificialia. His work reflects cycles of regeneration in nature and environmental issues.

The poet W.S. Merwin writes of him, "Those of us who know him have been aware for years that Leland is a true original, a living treasure among us, and it is fortunate for all of us that his sculpture, with its representations of the irreplaceable life of these islands, is receiving some of the attention and honor it deserves."