How it all started

It started when I moved from Toronto to Vancouver. Two suitcases, a city where I knew nobody, and nobody knew me. I'd moved to pursue makeup for film. I couldn't have told you why. I just knew I liked being on set.

As I got deeper into makeup, my body started rejecting it. The glues, the paint, the sprays. Around the same time, I discovered the opposite. Nature. Most places I'd lived hadn't had much of it. I'd never touched real moss, never seen frogs on a hike or crabs by the water. British Columbia kept pulling me in one direction while the makeup work pushed me in the other.

Life did what it does. Ups, downs, jobs lost and found, the general pressure of living in a city and all of it pushed me toward nature as a kind of refuge.

By then I was already working in luxury: fashion, cosmetics, the world of polish and presentation. I'd been an artist in other forms before that, performing, painting, design. But learning about botanics, and the ecosystems inside them, ended up making me feel more like an artist than any stage or project ever had. It felt like understanding, finally, and understanding meant I could orchestrate.

I made peace with the earth again. I started paying attention. I gave, and I took, and I healed, and I existed. I learned about plants, about scent, about sensory experiences, about the land I lived on. That curiosity to learn, and then to build is what brought me here: a community project started with one intention. To bring us closer to the forest.

You're here now, reading this. So maybe it's already working, just a little.