Book Review/Waking up in Eden
Waking up in Eden
In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island
By Lucinda Fleeson
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Paperback $13.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Lucinda Fleeson was a big city journalist who had a wall filled with awards for her writing skills, but wanted more than what had become a routine life. So she did what most of us only dream about. She quit her high paying job, sold her house and moved half way across the world to tend a garden.
Not just any garden, mind you, but as close to the Garden of Eden as she could find. She took a low paying job to work on a remote Hawaiian Island at the National Tropical Botanical Garden – a 100-acre garden estate nestled amid ocean cliffs, secluded coves and a rain forest. It was a Hawaii that isn’t readily seen by tourists.
On a reporter’s instinct she went there because native plants were dying off at an alarming rate. Hawaii has been called the Extinction Capital of the world. Invasive species of plants, animals and, yes, humans are imperiling this Garden of Eden.
On her job she was in a mid-life crisis when she made a decision to do what most people in their 40s only dream of doing. Uprooting herself from the quagmire of what had become a routine and reinventing herself. She left that comfortable urban life for a new adventure.
She admits in her back page acknowledgments that the pull to garden came from some of her most evocative childhood memories of “my mother’s backyard garden. Her magenta peonies…the grape-colored lilacs filled the house with scent.” She said she came from a long line of gardeners.
But her home gardens were nothing to compare with what she found in Kauai, Hawaii where she took the job at the National Tropical Botanical Garden as a fundraiser to save the gardens from closure. The first day she arrived, she knew changes had to be made. She encountered a discouraging sign that announced the presence of the garden with bold letters saying: “Private Property. No Trespassing.” Not very inviting for tourists, she noted.
She had been promised housing on the garden campus, but was greeted by a dilapidated cottage that hadn’t been occupied for two years. Her first greeting from the house inhabitants made her scream when a flesh-colored Gecko dropped from the ceiling on her head and slithered away as she tried to force open a window.
In the days to come she accompanied a plant hunter into the rain forest in search of the last of a dying species. She followed a paleontologist into a limestone cave where the entrance had collapsed during a hurricane and learned the island’s history through its rich fossil life.
She watched closely as a botanical expert propagates rare seeds in a effort to reclaim the landscape. Lucinda learned the value of choosing passion over security, individuality over convention and the pressing need to protect the earth. While seeing all this first hand, she began to see the importance of her own life.
Botanist Dr. Bill Klein was her boss and told her it is the nature of gardeners to improve disasters. Her job was to make the long neglected gardens back into paradise and more appealing so tourists would flock to them and bring the dollars needed to improve the facility. While she downplays her own role in recreating an Eden, she interweaves a history of the island, its culture, its people and its history.
Fleeson now lives in Washington, D.C. and is the director of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
She dedicates the book to gardeners all over who take such environmental disasters and improve on them.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)