Twenty years ago, John Calhoun uprooted his life in the San Francisco Bay Area suburbs. He left a stressful job in architecture and sold all his possessions in hopes of finding peace and well-being on 8 acres in Fort Bragg, a town farther north on the California coast. Calhoun, who was living with HIV, wasn’t looking for a project or the opportunity to create his dream home in the country. “I thought it would be a nice place to live out the remaining days,” he says. “I didn’t buy the property with the idea of creating a huge garden.” But the garden, which Calhoun has cultivated for two decades, digging his hands into the soil and filling it with thousands of plants, revived him. “I think the garden has played the largest role of anything in my life,” he says.

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