The fields and forests of Sonoma County have been my home since I was born there in 1974. My family's house was in the flatlands between south Santa Rosa and the laguna, and there my siblings and friends and I sauntered through tall grass and climbed massive Valley Oaks with horizontal, undulating limbs. My classrooms were at other homes around the county, among its various plant communities, on Sonoma Mountain or near the creek in Glen Ellen, and since we had ample recess time during our long days of schooling, we learned much through our direct physical contact with the dirt, rocks, and trees of the landscape (as well as from the usual quarrels and alliances of schoolchildren).
Even though the area has been my home since I was born, I have travelled and lived in several other places. I entered college at UC Santa Cruz in 1992, but decided the next year to take the train through Mexico to Guatemala. Soon thereafter I sought apprenticeships in horticulture, as an alternative to university education. I lived and worked in gardens in New Mexico, California, and finally at the Bullock Brothers Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island, in the Puget Sound north of Seattle. I learned to make compost properly, dig garden beds by hand, save and sow seeds, and work with fruit trees, goats, and honeybees.
After two years at the Bullock Brothers, I made a perplexing shift to the other shore. I moved to Taiwan, to the dense and buzzing city of Taipei, and taught English to children in small rooms with stark lighting. This was a deeply edifying experience, but after 20 months I needed strongly to return to a more direct contact with the soil and trees, and so I returned to Sonoma County to see how I might do that.
Since 2005 I have worked steadily and professionally with trees, while taking classes in arboriculture and aesthetic pruning at the Santa Rosa Junior College and Merritt College in Oakland. I have also earned a fine arts degree in painting from Sonoma State University (2009), and most recently a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee (2014). I am now back at my boyhood home in the Santa Rosa Plain, where I live with my wife and our three baby girls and my father, pruning, gardening, cooking, drawing, and changing (diapers).