About this item

Like so many of us, Lucinda Fleeson wanted to escape what had become a routine life. So, she quit her big-city job, sold her suburban house, and moved halfway across the world to the island of Kauai to work at the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Imagine a one-hundred-acre garden estate nestled amid ocean cliffs, rain forests, and secluded coves. Exotic and beautiful, yes, but as Fleeson awakens to this sensual world, exploring the island's food, beaches, and history, she encounters an endangered paradise -- the Hawaii we don't see in the tourist brochures. Native plants are dying at an astonishing rate -- Hawaii is called the Extinction Capital of the World -- and invasive species (plants, animals, and humans) have imperiled this Garden of Eden. Fleeson accompanies a plant hunter into the rain forest to find the last of a dying species, descends into limestone caves with a paleontologist who deconstructs island history through fossil life, and shadows a botanical pioneer who propagates rare seeds, hoping to reclaim the landscape.



About the Author

Lucinda Fleeson

I began my journalism career in college as a photographer, shooting rock concerts and protest marches for alternative weeklies in Boston and Cambridge, Mass. Freelancing stories, I began to find my voice as a reporter and writer and eventually abandoned the camera for a typewriter.Hooked on news, I worked for several local papers before landing at The Philadelphia Inquirer. I wrote hundreds of news articles, features and investigative stories that tracked everything from corruption in the Atlantic City police department, to the art and cultural beat. I never expected to leave The Inquirer, imagining that I'd die with a half-written story in the computer. But as the landscape for journalism started shifting cataclysmically under my feet, I felt stymied, fenced in, at a dead end.Because of my amateur interest in gardening, I had befriended a Philadelphia botanist, Dr. William Klein, who became the director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii. Unexpectedly he offered me a job, and I grabbed it.For two years I lived on Kauai. As I explored the Hawaiian plant crisis and hunted down garden history, I realized that I was, and always will be, a reporter at heart.The Hawaiian experience returned me to journalism, but in a new sphere. I spent several years training journalists overseas, in Eastern and Central Europe, Africa and Latin America. Settling in Washington, D.C., I freelanced articles for the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the American Journalism Review, and others. Now I direct a program for international journalists at the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and teach writing and reporting.



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