In early July, in about my second week at the North County Times, I was assigned a story on Vista's Botanical Forest. The city was planning a demonstration garden to raise money for the full garden, a huge, 15-acre deal. The guy running the operation, Dr. Mardy Darian, has his own botanical forest at his home in the rich part of Vista, and since they were modeling the Vista garden after his home garden, I invited myself to his house for a tour. I kicked this out in about 20 minutes after getting back to the office and passed it along to a few of my coworkers. One of them wrote back and said, "So you really ARE a writer!" and the other wrote back and said, "Eric, you are the Lord of the Dance." The editors, meanwhile, decided that none of it was worth putting in the real story (whenever I start to romanticize the North County Times, I need only remember this, which is probably my low point in journalism). Sadly, Darian quit the board after two years over disagreements with the City Council. They're now trying to move forward without him on a much, much smaller scale (and for 1/25th the cost), on the newly renamed Alta Vista Gardens.

	Mardy "Doc" Darian laying pipe on the future site of the Vista Botanical Forest (from the North County Times Web page).

"Don't worry," the Doctor says. "None of the spiders here are poisonous."

He reaches over and flicks one off my neck, while I try to pry one off my shirt collar.

The Doctor is completely insane.

He's driving me around his three-acre botanical garden in a golf cart, modified to carry heavy gardening loads and fat people on tours.

"You look like a pretty thin guy," he says. "I usually like fat people on the back. Gives me better traction."

We'll just have to go faster, he says, and rams down the accelerator, sending the golf cart flying around a corner and up a hill and threatening to toss me into an endangered palm tree.

Dr. M.E. Darian is a thin, old, rich man, with sunken blue eyes and tough, tanned skin. He's wearing the standard old person's garden fare -- jeans, white T-shirt, brown garden boots. He looks like the house gardener, and not the owner of a spacious mansion at the top of a gated community in Shadow Ridge. And then he tells his wife, a young looking blonde with a European accent, to get the tires changed on the Lexus. She dodders off.

The Lexus has a KPBS license plate, so I guess the Doctor is pretty liberal. When he goes into the anti-television rant ("You do nothing for the environment when you sit down to watch TV"), and then into the anti-church rant ("Don't write that," he says. "My wife doesn't like to see it in print"), it's confirmed.

The Doctor doesn't like politics, or the church, or sports. He works seven days a week, from dark until dark, on his two gardens: the three-acre private forest at his house and the new, Vista city-owned, 15-acre forest in the city park. The house tour takes eight hours on foot, and the Doctor shows me 10 percent of the land in the 45-minute "two-bit tour" by golf cart.

He sets off almost immediately with a commanding, "get in." I get in, and we drive into the forest. The path is barely the width of the golf cart, and overhanging plants slap me in the face. The Doctor is not apologetic.

"I hope you don't mind spiders," he says.

"No."

I only get time for on-word responses, because Doc has already moved to the next plant. Rare species of palms. Staghorn ferns, spiral ferns, blue ferns, tree ferns. It was the Doctor's idea to "train" the plant's roots to grow around trees by planting them on 6-12 inch thick PVC pipes. When they have grown accustomed to circular roots, he moves them to trees, to create a three-dimensional landscape.

We pass by mango trees, macadamia nut trees, avocado trees, and a peach tree. The peach tree grew here on its own, brought by a bird.

The house is zoned, from palms, to desert landscape, to tropical rainforest, to redwood forest. The Doctor starts right in at the palms: "Our primary goal is to get the human race to start reforesting of the earth. As it is now, we don't stand a chance."

He points to a rare palm tree that Japanese soldiers ate to extinction when they were abandoned on an island in World War II. He makes me get out and look inside a blue palm tree now extinct in Madagascar because the natives cut them down for jewelry.

He has me smell the world's largest Jasmine plant, also from Madagascar, and the world's largest carnation, from North Africa. They smell good. Like flowers.

The doctor is incredibly serious about his work. "Eight days a week," he says. "Really."

He built the entire place himself, starting 38 years ago. He poured the cement, built the paths, put in security walls and built two fishponds. The City of Vista, which has him building its garden, wants waterfalls and ponds, but Darian does not. Water is a waste, he says. He'll get his way.

The fishpond at the house just met with disaster. Yesterday, a pipe broke. The pond drained. Over 60 Japanese koi, some of them three feet long, died -- that's $20,000 worth of fish. One survived, a small yellow fish that swims by itself in the upper pool, where the Doctor moved it. "My wife was in tears," he says.

There are three paths through the forest. The entire property is built on a steep hill, so the paths are cut into the side at different levels. We take the middle one. He points to the path 30 feet below us, and the bases of trees that shoot up another 60 feet beyond the middle road. He points up -- "see the upper path?"

I look, don't see it, and pretend to be looking. The Doctor grabs my head and tilts it backward. I wasn't looking high enough. The upper path is not a path so much as a tree walk, cut out of Eucalyptus board, stretching from tree to tree. It looks dangerously unstable.

When we walk out on it 10 minutes later, it wobbles. We stand in the tree house and look out across the canopy. "This is what you see when you're a bird," he says.

I look down and see a mat of green. The forest canopy is thick. But from the tree house, we can see beyond the property. Immediately next door, bulldozers are planning a new housing tract. The entire area has been graded, cleared and prepared for housing.

"Think what you see if you look at that and you're a bird," the Doctor says, gloomily. "They're going to cram as many houses as they can in there."

He starts ranting. "They've spent $1 million just grading that property." He's gripping the edge of the tree house, which trembles underneath us. "How much planting trees? They don't even care." He points out the peach tree, brought to his garden by birds, not even planted by him, and then looks at the grading project again and the bulldozers and the acres and acres of cleared brown dirt.

"No, don't write that. My wife doesn't like to see that." Again, censored by his wife. He turns and looks at the dirt again, and then back to me. "But you know it's true."

From the top of the tree walk, he points out two redwood trees. Growing next to them is a taller, blue-needled tree. From the arid deserts of North Africa, the Doctor says. "You can't live there," he says. "Nothing can live there. Only this."

He's proud that it's here, growing right next to the redwoods, which are found in wet, cool areas. We stop and look at the tiny blue cones, and the Doctor starts ranting again. How he needs help, how people are all consumers, how everyone thinks it's not their fault. He runs through a list of excuses, "I don't have kids, I don't have the money, I don't have the time, I drive a clean car." Or, the one that sends him into a fury, "God will take care of it."

He snaps up. "Look out there. How can you look at this and say this is not something we can do?"

We go get back in the golf cart and ride back up to the driveway. The sun came out while we were in the forest. The Doctor stands on the car and preaches about religious zealots and politicians and the value of trees.

"It appeals to you, doesn't it?" he asks. "Because it's the truth. Nothing hits home like the truth."