Tangier Gardens: out of the classroom into the real world… via plant portals

This story is low fantasy--about people, on strange journeys. They are seeking portals, and have unusual, captivating and inspiring interactions with plants, gardens and landscapes...  I have been influenced by Kenneth Grahame, Algernon Blackwood, Rod Serling, Chris Carter and others. Now the synopsis. In the summer of 2000, a young American college student, Christopher Janus (his friends call him CJ), struggles with deep cultural roots, casual intoxication and physical injuries as he tries to complete his term abroad design study. That's how it started… and it grew… inside and deep. Will he overcome these challenges? Can his will power, his family or his girlfriend give him strength? Or will his new-found, arcane botanical friends at the Hibiscus House save him? This is a landscape story—landscape in its broadest sense: natural, social, geography, culture, gardens and plants. It is a ride that will magically take you from portals of inspirational beauty to the esoteric pleasures of the paranormal, the metaphysical.  Christopher Janus grew up in the New Mexico landscape—always inspired and often succoured by it. He was influenced by Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keefe and JB Jackson. But life had other plans for him. Morocco—if you haven’t been there you don’t know. Christopher Janus had been there before but he still didn’t know.  CJ had for many years, worked hard to graduate. In Morocco this time on his last class before graduation, he planned to take it easy because, in his own words, he had “earned it”. CJ thought he learned about landscape realism at college. But it wasn’t until his Moroccan design study when he discovers that landscape realism… is magical. Something from northwest Africa gets under his skin and “unbalances” him for… years. From the Alhambra, to Tangier, to the northwest Africa Rif and Middle Atlas mountain landscapes, this is an ethnobotanic coming of age story about a designer. The student faces conflicting realities caused by his love of Tangier plants and gardens while, from the northwest Africa landscape, the threat of death and worse haunts him. CJ tells his own story--a landscape story. And what about plant portals? CJ tells all.