And it was just so great, like one night I was sitting down and I just started talking to some people and I thought they were really bright people and it was Paul and Ann Ehrlich.
Oh yeah.
And then a week later I started talking to another guy and he was speaking kind of rough Spanish and he was sitting down at the gardeners and he'd obviously been out all day.
He was dirty and we started talking.
And I said, this guy is almost as bright as that other couple.
And it was E.O. Wilson.
So that experience, kind of meeting with those researchers and scientists and all the people in it, really interested in how to kind of protect and develop the area.
It had a lot to do with wanting to do this and it's the model. If you look at the dining area there and then look at the dining area at Las Cruces Field Station, it's pretty similar.
So there's not one original idea in this place.
Really.
But I don't think there's been an original idea in gardening for the last thousand years.
They're all just, you know, twists on things that have been done.
But always getting at the same thing.
The house was built on the other side of the property and I was over here and just walking around.
And all of a sudden I started noticing different places and thought, gee, this would be a nice place for a Japanese garden.
This would be a nice place for this and this would be great for vegetables.
And it was like, dang, that night I started sketching out, you know, a plan.
And that plan from that first night is really what's developed here.
You know, we thought of lots of different things. We thought of just leaving it alone.
But being a North American, I have a hard time doing that.
It was like the largest button company in New York.
And one of his uncles remembered Tagua.
He said, oh yeah, we used to use that.
He had been a young kid as it was being phased out.
So the whole project kind of developed like that.
You got a hold of Ivan Shenard and so we had Patagonia and a couple of other companies interested in using the buttons.
And then I guess some of the buttons were made too thin and they were cracking.
You know, they're sort of a minimum thickness they had to be.
And that was something the modern button people weren't aware of.
It's a little memory loss.
And so they're making them thin and they started cracking and washing machines and dry clothes.
A shipment of Tagua got sent to a manufacturing plant in Asia.
And they arrived and the bag was filled with the buttons and fungus.
There was like a fuzzy fungus over everything.
And they called Karen and they were worried about opening it.
They wanted a disease and Karen was in a bit of a panic about what to say and how could they get them because they needed them to finish the shirts.
So I said, well just tell them that it's a special process and we're not going to charge them extra.
Although normally it's an extra charge to have the patina.
It's a little medicinal herb garden.
We have a local witch who plants this and takes care of it.
She makes teas and tinctures and appointments from here.
She's got some other areas too that she grows.
But this is her main garden.
The plan is to have a First Nations garden.
Four gardens that are about the people who've settled here.
First Nations, the European settlers, the Japanese fishing community, and hippies.
Yeah, this is a local guy who made this.
It's all made out of stuff that was here on site.
And his name is Jan Jansen.
He does just great structures.
He shows up with a truckload full of driftwood and miscellaneous pieces.
He lights up a big joint and goes to work.
So on the botany side, you know, the climate in Tafino is very similar to southern Chile.
And so this little area in here I've planted up with a lot of Chilean forest plants.
So we have an alersei tree.
Oh really?
Yeah, an alersei is the second longest living tree in the world.
And the tree is really analogous in the forest to the western red cedar.
These can grow up to 4,000 years old.
It's the second longest living next to a bristle cone.
3,000 species of plants in the southern cone of South America.
BC has about 3,000 species.
3 overlap.
This plant is a gunnera.
This is the dark side of creating these gardens in the fall.
And she's doing her PhD thesis on invasive plants in western Ireland.
The number one problem.
She sent me photographs of entire valleys covered with nothing but this.
Nothing else lives under it or near it.
So you're going to watch this one carefully now?
Well, we've dug a bunch of them out.
And destroyed them in burn piles.
I guess.
We were out here developing a little garden and came across this.
And we think that there's a connection with all of the Sasquatch stories.
Both in First Nations and European culture.
We did this on April 1st a couple of years ago.
And put an article in the Westerly about an amazing discovery.
And I got a call from Bruce Frank, who's one of the elected chiefs from the Cloakry at First Nations.
And he said, George, you know, I have to tell you that some of us are really upset about you digging up our ancestors.
And so he didn't know that he'd been had until he came over.
You know, the piece of the garden that I'm sure for a lot of people is so significant,
is just the ability to see this.
Because getting through here and being able to walk through without A,
half killing yourself and B, coming out soaking wet and covered with dirt.
Being able to walk through a forest like this and just see that landscape is pretty phenomenal.
You know, laying out the paths, people say, boy, these paths are just really nicely done.
And it just seems perfect.
It was kind of where we could go.
Yeah, like there's no choice here.
Coming through here at the beginning, you know, it was like climbing up on these logs and falling over into the salal
and trying to shimmy up trees to see what was around.
It was a good time, though.
You get a real sense of how these forests work in here.
You know, like this seed had leaned over 80 or 90 years ago, falling into that other tree.
It doesn't lock the other tree over and then the branching has just gone up.
It makes a lot of noise in a strong wind that trees out.
It will go over.
Things are always toppling.
The interesting thing in it is what are the characteristics of this place that allowed it to become
what perhaps is the best example of the transition from an industrial to a conservation economy?
What allowed that to happen?
I think size is one thing.
It's a small enough place that the individual characters all could have some impact in a large way.
And then, you know, the demographics of who lived here.
Again, comparing it to Euclulet, Defino had a lot of hippies who had stayed.
So there was some of that American energy that was willing to create blockades and get arrested and be impolite.
The catalysts were people who were willing to protest.
They had not stood at that road ending and said, you are not driving that bulldozer around this corner.
It really did come to a moment when they just stand on a road and said, no, stop.
This is where it stops right here, no more.
And it was considered outrageous.
I mean, people were so pissed off about it.
