Gardener Joe Hollis on Cultivating a Garden of Useful Plants & Thriving Off a Minimal Income [episode 73]

 
 
 

UPDATE! There was a catastrophic fire at Joe’s place, Mountain Gardens. To support his rebuilding, donate to the gofundme: https://gofund.me/07358a1c

For the past 25 years, Joe Hollis has been engaged in developing Mountain Gardens, a Paradise Garden on several acres of mountain woodland in western N. Carolina. For Joe, Paradise Garden is both a place to live and a way to live, and, above all ‘visionary ecological theater.’ He tries to act on deep instincts and archetypal images related to human habitat and niche as a way of providing a sustainable values system with sufficient appeal to challenge the dominant consumer culture. Take a garden tour with Joe and learn more, at the Mountain Gardens YouTube channel. 

Mountain Gardens is a botanical garden of useful plants featuring the largest collection of native Appalachian and Chinese medicinal herbs in the Eastern US, organically grown at the foot of the Black Mountains in Western North Carolina. Mountain Gardens specialties include: native and oriental medicinal herbs, wild foods, perennial vegetables, craft plants, and other ethnobotanicals. Offering for sale seeds, plants, fresh and dried herb material, workshops, resources, a self-help herb center and so much more!

LISTEN VIA PODCAST:

LISTEN TO HEAR:

  • Joe shares some of his story and how Paradise Mountain found him

  • On the events that changed Joe’s life trajectory forever

  • Culture shock and coming home from the Peace Corps in Borneo

  • On what happened when ginseng spoke to Joe

  • On remembering another way to live from and with the Earth

  • Cultivating a botanical garden of useful plants

  • On growing the right plants for your bio-climate

  • Cultivating wild perennial foods

  • How agriculture changed the modern human relationship to the land

  • Tending to the diversity of the Earth, through the garden

  • The special relationship between the plants of East Asia and Eastern North America

  • On getting out of the system of capitalism and into a more direct relationship with the Earth

  • Building an intuitive relationship with the garden

  • How Joe realized that he was in constant dialogue and communication with the plants

  • On what can be accomplished in a lifetime

  • Joe shares how he utilizes the resources and organic materials from the land

  • Beauty as diversity

  • Joe shares his favorite and signature plant, and why everyone should grow them

  • How the plants teach us about the body

  • How adaptations boost the immune system and normalize systems within the body

  • On growing wasabi and specialist mountain plants

  • A day in the life of Joe

  • Advocating for a different lifestyle

  • On meeting your needs in the garden, instead of with money

  • Joe’s library legacy and herbal self-help help center

  • On the Daoist tradition as a philosophy of how to live on Earth without messing it up

  • Finding your nitch

  • On the unequal distribution of resources and money as the blood of civilization

  • Living off a minimal income and the resources of the Earth

  • Choosing a different path from the norm

  • Joe’s upcoming book - ‘Make Paradise Not Money’

  • Practicing neo-primitive living

  • How the universe responds to our sincerity

  • And so much more!

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Theme music is “It’s Easier” by Scarlet Crow http://www.scarletcrow.org/ and “Meeting Again” by Emily Sprague  https://mlesprg.info/

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