Hawaii Island residents might notice a familiar icon this year when sending Priority Mail.
Starting today, all Priority Mail stamps sold around the country will feature an image of Hilo’s Liliuokalani Park and Gardens. The park, celebrating its centennial anniversary this year, was selected last month to be depicted as the U.S. Postal Service’s official 2017 Priority Mail stamp.
The stamp proposal was submitted several years ago by the Friends of Liliuokalani Gardens, a nonprofit group planning a series of events to celebrate the park’s 100-year anniversary. The Postal Service receives about 50,000 submissions per year, USPS spokesman Duke Gonzales said.
At least 70,000 Liliuokalani Gardens stamps will be for sale in Hawaii alone, Gonzales said in an email, and “anyone buying a Priority Mail stamp in the U.S. — from Maine to Mountain View, from Kansas City to Keaau — will be able to enjoy a small visual sample of Hilo’s own Liliuokalani Gardens.”
“We were just thrilled (to be chosen),” K.T. Cannon-Eger, a leader in the Friends of Liliuokalani Gardens said Friday. “Thrilled for Hilo and thrilled for the gardens. We were just so happy.”
The stamp is based on a 2012 photograph by Bill Eger, Cannon-Eger’s husband and a professional photographer. The photograph depicts Liliuokalani’s iconic red wooden shelter on a stone bridge and three stone lanterns.
The stamp is part of a 9-year-old USPS series called American Landmarks. One other Hawaii icon — the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in 2014 — has been depicted in the series. Historically, just three other Hawaii County icons have ever been portrayed as postal stamps: City of Refuge in 1972, the Kilauea Volcano in 2006 and the Hawaiian Rain Forest in 2010.
Cannon-Eger said Liliuokalani is also the first Hilo locale to be featured as a stamp and the first Japanese garden to ever be depicted. It was created and designed by Greg Breeding and Dan Cosgrove, both based on the mainland.
Cannon-Eger is a frequent, longtime Liliuokalani visitor who calls the park her “happy place.”
She eventually hopes to see the Postal Service create a series of Japanese garden stamps. There are about 400 Japanese gardens in North America, she said, and yet only a couple dozen reach their centennial year.
The stamp will be dedicated today at an 11 a.m. free public ceremony at the gardens’ Shoroan Tea House. Centennial events will begin this year and run through 2019, Cannon-Eger said.
Stamps will be available for purchase at post offices nationwide today, online at USPS.com and by phone at 800-782-6724.
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
