By Mary Pat Palmer 

When I was pregnant with my daughter Maia, I often sat in the middle of a fairy ring in meditation.  A fairy ring is created by the death of a mother redwood.  The mother redwood grows tall and straight and around her grow her same-aged children.  The mother dies naturally, or perhaps was logged, and the ring of redwoods remains. Young redwoods are the mother; not seeds thrown off but created from her very body. The ring of trees that result have a very powerful energy.  They are as ancient as the original mother.  My gestation fairy ring was in Sebastapol, California and the trees perhaps one hundred years old. 

After Maia’s birth in 1969 I moved East to Vermont.  I founded a large back-to-the-land commune growing organic food and medicinal herbs and driving our great and grand draft horses.  We were surrounded by trees, mostly maples with their amazing Fall color and sweet sap, which we gathered and boiled.  Still, I was terribly homesick for the redwoods. Since childhood, redwoods were my constant friends and companions.  Over the years as I read reports of logging and battles against clear cutters and others, my pain and longing grew.  However, I moved to Boston and became a part of the greening movement in that city.

I never believed in the concept of private property.  In many ways I still don’t.  However, I had a powerful revelation when herbalist Jean Argus bought her land in upstate New York.  I fully grasped the difference between ownership and stewardship.  I understood that if Jean, a wonderful steward, didn’t buy that land, someone else would.  And that someone might be very dangerous.   I opened my heart to stewardship. 

At the time I was very poor.  About six years later I bought sixteen acres of land in beautiful Philo, Anderson Valley, in Northern California.  Thirteen of these acres are redwoods.  The redwoods were sustainably logged about forty years ago so most of them are about one hundred years old.  The redwoods called me for a very long time.  Finally, I heard them and answered.  Two years ago I moved home.  I understood that I could not live without them, quite literally.  I almost died from colon cancer.  They could have died, sacrificed to another vineyard.  We are alive and well.  Every day they fill my heart with great joy.  It is a struggle to pay the taxes and support the land but with the help of the redwoods it will happen.

Three acres of land have become the Philo School of Herbal Energetics and Educational Center.  The houses and outbuildings are here, in great need of repair.  The new orchard, medicine garden and vegetable garden thrive in about two-thirds of an acre which is fenced, allowing the deer and other animals to roam freely on the rest of the land.

The thirteen acres of redwood on Philo Pharm remain as I found them, with walking trails. Many plants are specific to the redwood forest, among them wintergreen, wild ginger and the beautiful Columbia Lily.  My altar at the back of the land is what they call a "goose bin” around here.  Redwoods are often hollowed out by fire, leaving a shell that reaches to the sky.  According to locals, geese were kept in these hollows at night to protect them from predators.  Mountain lions still roam back there. The altar is about 20 feet high and radiates Spirit.

I am surrounded by neighbors who did what I did.  We are all redwood preservationists.  The result is over one hundred acres of redwoods.  Four miles south of me are the old-timers at Hendy Woods, the local cathedral of trees. Old growth redwoods tower in massive and awesome grandeur.  To my north are the Navarro Redwoods, younger but breathtakingly beautiful as the light filters through their branches.

It is the interplay of the Botanical Sanctuary that moves me most.  My worship of redwoods allowed me to create this sanctuary which was already a sanctuary but could have been destroyed.  In turn, the redwoods are my ongoing inspiration.  I am inspired by other beings; my children, baby seals, the swoop of a flock of birds, the Blue Cohosh emerging from Jean’s land in New York, the way Ashwaganda grows here in Philo.  I am filled with reverence daily by these redwoods around me.  It is always new, always renewing.