CJ needs help, where can he find it?

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PLANT PORTALS

Who is CJ?

He is the protagonist in the series, The Landscape Architect.

The Landscape Architect is the title of a series of fictional autobiographies. These are CJ’s autobiographies. In this series, CJ reveals the twists and turns in the development of his career as a professional landscape architect via his interactions with cultures, landscapes, gardens and plants of the world—where the unexpected and downright strange become daily facts of life.

Tangier Gardens is the debut novel in that series.

When you dig into Tangier Gardens, you will find a contemporary coming of age action novel about CJ (Christopher Janus), who like us is facing a broad range of distressing challenges.

CJ needs a break. He has been busting his hump full time six years at university with one more class till graduation.

He wanted just a few moments of repose before getting on with his career.

Didn’t happen. We all sadly know that story. But how did CJ deal with it? Tangier Gardens is that story.

CJ, studying landscape architecture, is into pedestrian towns and warm sandy beaches. For his last class, a term abroad design study, he’s on his way to Tangier, a town with sandy beaches on the Med and a historical pedestrian district, the medina. 

However, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and landing in Tangier immediately upsets his planned easy observe-and-check-the-box design study. He is thrown off balance and he has to start all over from scratch–no more easy study.

With Andalusian legacies, languorous gardens, Moroccan markets and ancient medinas, Tangier Gardens brings Mediterranean life to the armchair traveler.

If you are: 

-A nature lover, into urban gardening or a landscape architecture aficionado;

-Curious about all things green–the environment, plants, gardens, landscape;

-Intrigued about the North African multi-cultural, mystical history of people and plants, then

–Tangier Gardens IS A MUST.

Tangier Gardens is my debut novel in the series The Landscape Architect. Is the landscape CJ’s worst enemy or is he his own worst enemy? Can he design his way out of this conundrum? Could coming of age be more awkward?

…Always Watching…

by

They are… always watching…

…always watching…

I live in a heavily touristed mountain region. Guests from around the world in 2026 come for an hour or two to see the Jungfrau. The Jungfrau? A mountain? 

Then the modern tourists are off to their next destination. Few are aware that this Jungfrau Region has been walked by the likes of Tolkien and Byron. Tolkien and Byron visited when the only means of transport were their own two legs. They walked. They slept. They walked again—over days. For them this region was life-changing. Why, you might ask?

Because, as one put it: “I saw the mountains but the mountains did not see me. I wasn’t there long enough.” Let me interpret. The enormity of these mountains, the enormity of their physical presence is the clue. They have a time frame, nay, a speed of communication that does not fit into today’s tourist drive by.

Byron captured it in Canto 3 of his ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. Tolkien captured it in the Rivendel landscape in his ‘Lord of the Rings’. The Jungfrau Region mountains’ mood and communication comes via their microclimate, their clouds,  their waterfalls—sunrise, sunset, moonrise over days, weeks, seasons.

They are… always watching…