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The group pushed through the screen door that separated this room from the next and immediately fell silent. A hush permeated the room, and the only sounds came from the fans that stayed on all the time to give proper ventilation in the greenhouse.
The group slowly looked skyward and marveled at the exotic large trees growing there.
Huge flowering trees of every description provided a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes.
Bougainvillea with large sprays of blossoms in red, orange, and yellow grew in shaggy bushes along the windows of this room in the greenhouse complex. A torch ginger grove was in the middle along with overflowing hibiscus bushes. The hibiscus was in such profusion that their large showy blossoms intermingled with the other jungle-like plants to create a sea of tropical flora.
This display room felt as humid as a Florida afternoon in mid-July, and there were tiny swarms of gnats that could not be gotten rid of. This was the most mysterious of the rooms, as the layout of it did not give viewers an unfettered glimpse across the span of the room. Overstuffed, indeed overplanted, with the most magnificent palms and tropical plants, it was an entire tropical jungle stuffed into a terrarium-sized space.
Heather laughed, breaking the spell, and said her glasses had fogged up from the intense humidity of the room.
“I feel like I’m on a set for the film Jurassic Park,” Jasmine’s husband said.
Holly also recovered her composure, but being awestruck was the most common reaction to the trees in the Tropical Forest Room, even for those who saw them every day.
For infrequent or new visitors, the effect was simply jaw-dropping.
This room alone earned the Shellesby College greenhouse complex the prestige of one of the top five greenhouses in the world.
“Well,” Holly said after the oohs and aahs had simmered down, “unfortunately, I have another story to tell you. I might hate this story even more than the bat story, but it is integral to why you’re here today.”
The group waited in anticipation.
“Simply put, your donations have made this room what it is, no more and no less. Without you, we would have faced a catastrophe. The college and I are forever in your debt.”
“Can you explain the catastrophe?” Heather asked. Holly nodded painfully.
“One of my many jobs here is to be in charge of the plant donations. Two years ago, we received a donation of a wonderful Guadalupe palm specimen. This was a mature tree, and it is, in fact, on the world’s endangered list, as it is native only to Guadalupe Island in Mexico. To have one in our collection was a true highlight for the greenhouse that year.”
“That sounds amazing,” V said. “How was it a catastrophe?”
Holly swallowed hard.
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Read the First Chapter HERE!
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Kira Kanani Seamon was born and raised in Hawaii. She attended the prestigious Punahou School as an award-winning honor student. A polymath, Kira is a gold medal/state winner in piano performance and a National and two-time Regional Dance Champion. She’s an award-winning photographer and has had her art accepted and sold in national and regional juried shows. She’s had over fifty newspaper cover stories about her art and is a fourteen-time grant recipient from cultural councils. She celebrated her first solo museum exhibit of her work in 2020. She was recently the inaugural artist-in-residence in Natick, Massachusetts. She received a personal letter from the Massachusetts Senate President and a Certificate of Recognition from the Massachusetts State Legislation in recognition of her grant from Framingham, Massachusetts. All of this culminated in her receiving the prestigious Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award, for which she appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2020. She took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Machu Picchu, Peru with the Punahou Alumni Association and her travel tale about that expedition is published in the 2021 September/October edition of the Writers and Readers’ Magazine. Additionally, her Peru photography is the editorial feature in the 2021 fall edition of DRIFT Travel magazine. DRIFT Travel is an upscale travel and lifestyle magazine with each issue being emailed to 4+ million digital magazine readers worldwide. Additionally, DRIFT is also part of the PressReader magazine/newspaper digital platform that puts DRIFT in thousands of hotels, cruise ships, resorts and airlines around the world, opening the door to an additional 300 million users annually. Kira has never met a story from Greek mythology that she didn’t love and has kept a daily journal since her teens. Dead Cereus is her first novel.
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