CJ needs help, where can he find it?

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?

Set Me Free

There are days… and they are coming all too frequently now, where the extremes of the socio-politico left and right, incessantly brought to us—by the streamers, the pop-citizen-journalists, and the traditional media—are just horribly unbearable.

The fix?

I go outside and walk. The quiet breezes from the forest and lake clear away the gaslighted, scum-generated tensions.

And the day begins again.

fiddysix

Today and tomorrow only.

56 years of dedication, discipline, service and inspiration…

So what, you might cynically ask?

The first snowfall of the winter…

We are in… the Northern Hemisphere, the first snowfall, the hope of Christmas and the first week of Advent—I want to celebrate.

In mid-career, CJ, in the Jungfrau Region of the Swiss Alps, seeking to balance his personal and professional life, discovers an ethereal link between culture and landscape.

—so here is a great story I have written about how the landscape heals personal hurt—Crystal Vision. Free ebook—short time—DOWNLOAD NOW. IT’S FREE UNTIL MIDNIGHT, 15DEC2025GET IT NOW—here’s the safe WeTransfer link: https://we.tl/t-S34P0CJPHr

Do It Now

https://amzn.to/41v2DNv

It’s me again—the hypocrite

with a black-friday weekend special

you can’t beat this deal

jump on it

FREE

watch someone else struggle with life

watch the failures

hope for the successes

a short fast fun read

 https://amzn.to/41v2DNv

don’t you just hate these black-friday pushers!!!

Me too, the hypocrite.

I’m a Hypocrite

Hypocrite—that’s me because even though I hate this seasonal hype… I’m still going to do it myself. 

…isn’t being a hypocrite a thing these days?🤪

Hypocrite–you’ll have to live with that.🤪

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FLASH SALE 

My book, Curious Tales, is a lose-yourself-in-it kind of fiction about an American college student trying to come to grips with his six months in North Africa. The e-book is FREE on Amazon from 26-30November2025. 

Here is the link: https://amzn.to/41v2DNv

 Pick it up now—IT’S FREE for this short time only.

🍀🎉Celebration Time C’mon!🎉🍀

After decades of American and international landscape architecture and landscape experience, I concluded there was more to landscape architecture than science, horticulture, botany, hardscape and design.

So I started writing landscape stories—a genre nobody has ever heard of. This year I have finished my first series entitled ‘The Landscape Architect’.

The series has six books that trace the career of a landscape architect from university through retirement. In these books, the American protagonist, in his own words, addresses head-on all life’s twists and turns, seeking, as we all do, a healthy balance between personal life and work.

But, that balance can rarely be achieved because the protagonist constantly faces, in the Western European, North African and Middle Eastern places he lives and works, enigmatic challenges from those strange cultures and even stranger landscapes.

🍀!🎉!To celebrate the completion of that series, I offer free to everyone, the e-book version of book three, Yenbo Palms, where the protagonist, suffering from an horrendous family disaster at home in the USA, goes far, far away to work on a huge project in Saudi Arabia. Click on the following safe link to download the FREE Yenbo Palms e-book. https://bit.ly/4qBM3c1

Beautiful, inspiring… until you listen to local people describing it… then it, the landscape, becomes enigmatic—IRL mystifying.

 

Why?

Why do people from all over the world keep coming here to take pictures of this landscape?

Crystal Vision?

Why?

Free E-Book: Yenbo Palms

Tired of political and social turmoil? Take a break and grab this FREE old school fiction (won’t make you feel guilty about anything!). Yenbo PalmsCJ escapes personal distress by going to work in Saudi Arabia.

 

 

Cosmos

Nothing special here… unless you are invited to look closer—as I was.

Looking deeper and deeper into this cosmos flower… I find the mystery of creation… of birth… of growth… of beauty weaving together an aura that makes a cloth of existential marvel.

Cosmos=Greek=beautiful, harmony, ordered universe=Cosmos bipinnatus. 

Is that what I felt?

A Curious Tale, no?