In the 1970s, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and his wife Paula Dunaway took on an unusual environmental project in Hawaii. What began as a barren, badly eroded piece of land on Maui gradually became a thriving 19-acre palm forest containing nearly 3,000 individual palms.
Merwin, who was also a literary translator and environmentalist, spent decades restoring the land one plant at a time. Today, the forest stands as one of the most remarkable parts of his legacy.
