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Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This

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is for stories. I'm the Poet in the Forest, a

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children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,

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none of it would be possible if it wasn't for

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this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I

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talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's

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time that you get to know what has inspired me

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for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.

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Welcome back to the forest. Planting the seventeen hundred trees

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in the year nineteen ninety seven, planning it out, It's

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all in the written diaries where it needed to be

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a place of growth where there was already too much growth.

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I needed to have some sort of plan, and it

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couldn't steal from the roots of other living trees, especially

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when it comes to creating the umbrellas that in my

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mind I could see them, but to a six inch

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seedling that was going into the ground, that was several

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years up the road. But seventeen hundred seedlings. Now, let

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me be open and upfrontier. Seventeen hundred trees requires a

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lot of room. I only have so much of this

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forest that meant without permission, I was going to be

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traveling onto other people's property. The reason why any of

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this even started was because when I came here in

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nineteen ninety two, this forest looked like crap. It looked

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like those forests they used to call acid rainforests where

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everything was falling apart and not growing in proper order.

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They looked almost naked, destroyed, And it was like, if

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you have this one particular section of land and you

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want to plant twenty trees, then why does the other

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parts of the forest have to suffer? Because one particular

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tree farmer decided that he wanted to let his area

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be plentiful, why not let it all be plentiful. So

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there I was January of nineteen ninety seven, ordering my

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seventeen hundred tree seedlings from the state of North Carolina,

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and I knew that I was going to be going

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on to other people's property, and I knew I didn't

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have their permission. So I had to do secret, covert

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operations really early in the morning and late late late

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in the afternoon and night to get those seedlings in

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the ground. But the thing about those seedlings is that

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if you've truly walked through a real, authentic forest and

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not one designed by forest rangers and other people of science.

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Walking on a forest floor is rugged. Oh my god,

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where those tree roots used to be or where they're

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continuing to grow. There's no soil there. Maybe there's leaves

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in other soot, but there's also that vacant space that

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one wrong step could put you down to your ankle

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or put you down to your knee, because everything you

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thought was there didn't exist, because in an authentic forest,

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there's nothing out there grooming the land to make it

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look all home depot and lows pretty. So that was

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the struggle that I had to face, is that this

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forest was built by man back in the early part

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of the nineteen eighties. They came in with their bulldozers.

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They tore down those trees and basically they buried them.

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That's it, put dirt over them, buried them. Well, when

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the trees deteriorated, what happened those big old holes in

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the dirt that this forest farmer was going to find

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out in a very hard way how they existed, and

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the injuries that I suffered putting those trees in the ground.

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I can laugh about it now, but if you go

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back through the daily writing, which is always open for

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anybody to read nineteen ninety seven, you will see that

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a vision, far far, far greater than me put those

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trees in the soil, or what I assumed was soil.

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It was a real authentic forest floor. Hey, thanks for

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being a part of the conversation.