When I was in Sacramento there was a Shaman who sought me out and said that she had been having dreams. She knew me through other people but I'd never met her. (All this was new to me at the time. I am from Virginia and there is a whole different lingo in Virginia.) She said that she'd been having dreams that the earth was calling me and that I had a job to do for the earth and that I would be working with plants and I would be moving. At that time that was not a possibility for me. Then I had a dream that I was near the ocean, feeding llamas and gardening. 

A couple of months passed and my mom who was in Indonesia asked me to drive up to Mendocino. Someone she had met had suggested Mendocino as a place for her to move. So I drove up and I saw the Inn. I had to go up the Ukiah-Comptche Road to get to this place I was looking at and I saw the place from my dream. So, I applied for work there, and put on the application that I had dreamed that I was working there. The owners, Joan and Jeff called me the next day and said I was hired. That was good enough for them. I had applied for front desk because I didn't have any gardening experience at all, but they didn't have any work except for in the garden. Darcy was the only person there at the time doing gardening, so I became her assistant. I learned a lot from her and when she left I inherited the garden which was about 1/4 the size that it is now. We had eight beds and now we have thirty. 

I went into this feeling terrified. Even the small garden felt like way more than I could handle with what I knew. But Joan and Jeff just turned it over to me and trusted me with it. I worked a lot of hours the first couple of years. I started having dreams. I've always been a dreamer and I've always had very clear dreams. I was really interested in medicinal plants and I had started planting a lot of seeds because I couldn't find plants I was looking for. Some things wouldn't work. Dreams came to me about freezing seeds and doing other things with them. So I would just try what they told me and it would work. I was thinking about digging up the echinacea and harvesting the root and I had a dream where the echinacea said, no I'm not ready yet. I have to have three years before I'm ready. And then later I found out you need to let them grow three years before you harvest the roots. So, the garden was communicating with me in my dreams. I would sometimes have whole visualizations of what an area needed to look like and I would do that. 

People would say I couldn't do something and I knew that I could. I knew it would work and was the right thing to do. So I told Jeff, I'm having these thoughts that arise in my head when I'm working, voices that are very clear to me, like--this is what I need to do or not to touch this plant yet, and I'm having all these dreams. I dreamed about ferns, how to take the bottom of the fern and scrape it between glass and this whole detailed thing. When I told Jeff about it he said, Well that's how you propagate ferns. In my sleep I had been told exactly how to do it. Jeff, an anthropologist by training, gave me some books to read but I didn't read them because I felt like I needed to keep my innocence or naïveté. I didn't want to get a bunch of other people's knowledge in my head. I am a real skeptic and I was afraid I would be using their stuff and I would get garbled up. So for about eight years I didn't read anything on gardening. 

At one point I quit the garden because I was having problems with my crew. Being a manager is not my natural tendency. I usually just like to work on my own and not tell anybody else what to do, so I had a lot of conflict around being a manager and I quit. Beings from the garden would come to me in my dreams and tell me that they were suffering and that things weren't being handled right and that I needed to be there and that it wasn't time for me to leave. These were like lonesome notes or letters saying, We're really homesick for you and you need to come back. You're not done here yet. So I went back. I couldn't stand it. I felt like they were tugging at my heart to go back there. The skeptic in me thought I just missed the garden. 

A lot of my images of the garden spirits are cellular. The closest I can come to describing them is that they have candle flame shapes. They feel feminine and hum or vibrate with a high pitch. The land at the nursery is very magical and powerful. All of the workers there have been touched in meaningful ways. For the people who work there, it seems like whatever issues they have come to a head there and they either go through them or leave because it's more than they can handle. We have also had guests come there and have profound experiences. People are drawn there. I have been at Big River Nursery ten years this year. Many times I have wanted to leave but I continually reinvest in my life there and recognize that this is what I am doing now. The opportunity has been coming for me to bring information out into the public more. It's hard to talk about. I talk to guests about it, anyone who'll listen to it. 

I used to speak with spirits when I was a small child and I could see them. In high school I had some very intense experiences in that realm. For awhile I had one foot in the spirit world and one foot in this one and it got really scary. I closed down but I still had experiences where other people saw something in me or had messages for me. This shaman woman in Sacramento named Mia who had the dreams about me did a session with me where she led me on a guided journey and she used sound. She put sound into my body. In the journey she put me in a kind of backpack and we went down deep into the earth and there was a large woman on a mossy stone chair. The Shaman took me from her back and put me on the steps and the woman came to me and she put something in my spine. She put this stone in the middle of my spine and said Now you'll go and speak the truth. That's what I need you to do. Then Mia picked me up and took me back out. I didn't talk during the experience. It was in my head, this sort of dream. Mia said, That was the Mother. She has just given you a great gift. So, I don't know how but Mia was with me. She knew what was going on. She had a vision of what I was visioning even though we didn't say anything during the experience. 

Then I came up here and started doing gardening. I haven't done much talking. Maybe just the gardening is enough to bring this gift into other people's lives. We have guests who come here who are definitely affected by the garden. 

This happened to me because I had an open mind with no preconceptions about what I could or couldn't do in the garden. I was a blank slate. But it's been a challenge to believe in myself. As a manager I can't say, you do it because the book says to do it. I can only say, It's just how I feel it should be done or I dreamed that's the way to do it. I'm finding some confidence finally, but it has been a real challenge to believe in myself. Because it's all in my head or space, it's hard to trust it sometimes. I think in the society we were raised in, we were taught as women not to trust that. Intuition has been made fun of for so long. I have tended to discount those little voices in my head and my hunches. So it's neat that in this time of living, this trust is being reaffirmed. 

One of the things I dreamed was to dig the clay from the bottom of the beds. We had been culling it all off. After we did that, out next soil test was perfect--beyond what other people's soil was. If you didn't add anything to it for a year, it would probably still be wonderful. We make our own compost from llama manure, kitchen waste from the Inn and green manure grown in the beds over the winter months. We add oyster shell calcium and Sacred Mountain Minerals which are mined from an ancient sea bed from the desert. We put these in the beds in powder form. We dust it on the top and then turn the soil. The trace minerals can also be used internally by humans and animals. 

We are trying to blend two worlds. Our garden needs to be esthetically pleasing as a landscape installation and at the same time honor nature's ways. I find that a tricky balance to keep. There is a lot that we sacrifice esthetically to honor nature like not using pesticides and not using snail bate. We have snails and bugs and everything has holes in it. We generally keep a balance, but it's not perfect. The landscape is primarily thirty plants over and over again because the deer don't mess with them. We do this rather than lock them out. We try to work with them. We are also working with what people are ready for. Sometimes I am surprised by the workers receptivity. We have a little cat, Houston, who is a huntress. Usually we chase her out when she digs or poops in the beds. I had specifically said to her, You can have free reign in the garden because we have these gophers, so go for it and I'll forgive you your holes. A fellow from the boathouse had come up to work with us and he didn't know that I had said that. He shooed her out of the bottom of the garden. She came running up to me and clear as a bell I heard her say, You need to tell him about that because he just chased me out of the garden, and I was just doing my job. So I went down to bottom of the garden and said, What happened? Did you just chase Houston off? He said, Yes, she was digging in the beds. I said, But I had just told her that she could do that and she just ran by complaining to me. He said, Oh, No! and he walked off to apologize to her and to tell her she could come back. I was so surprised by that. I never know what people are willing to accept. I tend to be a little timid about putting my beliefs out there. 

I try to keep a balance--to get everything done in a day that needs to be done and to take time out and pay attention to the plants reflectively. If I don't stop to admire nature because I am too efficient and busy, then I miss a lot of the beauty. 

We have a market garden and sell to some Mendocino restaurants outside. When we grow a head of lettuce we cut the whole head and take it to them. Permaculture is sustainable agriculture. You don't take the whole plant but take the outer leaves and keep the plant going. We will get to that point when we have our own restaurant. We'll have more perennial and medicinal herbs. Jeff is a very devoted vegetarian. We are more and more trying not to take the life of something if we don't have to, even if it is a lettuce plant. 

We do a lot of picking up earthworms after the rains. We have a safe zone. One day I was weed eating an area near the pond. Before I went in, I had a dream about killing a frog. I was worried about that when I went in there. So I sent out a message, Watch out, I'm coming in with a weed eater. But I killed a snake. I was so upset. I stopped the weed eater and I sat by the pond and I said, I am serious! One of you people has just died because I am weed eating and I feel terrible. Everybody has to get out of the way of the weed eater. I am weed eating this whole area. And I outlined the area. Immediately, about 30 frogs and a couple of snakes jumped into the pond. No lie! As soon as I said that. If I had any doubts before that, they were dispelled. The creatures all got out of the way. Now we have a safe zone where we don't weed eat and we don't go in there without first announcing ourselves. I take time and I say Okay, we're coming through so everybody needs to watch out for us because we can't see you. I take the time to talk to nature and try to protect it as much as possible. It's hard. You step on things. Someone once told me, You can't walk in the garden without stepping on flowers. But you can really try not to or to be conscious and give them notice when you are coming through. 

I water the areas the night before we harvest and I say, Okay, you're going to be harvested tomorrow. I just say what we are doing and Thank you for being so beautiful and for feeding us. Taking the time to do that is really different from how people normally approach life. I notice that I am much happier when I connect with the surrounding life rather than just thinking about what has to be done. I'm much more comfortable in the garden than anywhere else. A lot of times if there is something really bothering me, I'll go down and say, Okay, I'm really suffering over this issue and I'm just going to work down here and if you could help me at all, I'd really appreciate any information. Always, things become clear to me when I do that. I have this dialog going on and things will come to me while I'm down there in the garden. I always feel better.