The following is an old rambling incomplete auto-bio I wrote in 1993 for the opening of my Site-Specific Art project called "Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden"  
The last two paragraphs were added circa 2012 when the "Secret Garden" closed

​

AUTOBIOGRAPHY Written CIRCA 1993

I was born in a hospital beside the mighty Susquehanna River in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania on July 29 1938. As a youth I played in a beautiful region scarred by early indiscriminate logging and strip mining.  I lived on a farm called Orchard Hill located in Bald Eagle Valley in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania.   My earliest recollection and puzzlement as a child was not being allowed to go near or swim in the shallow gentle waters of the wide River that so magnificently defined the area. "It's unsafe" I was told. "It is because the banks of the river are leaking raw sewage and the closed coal mines upstream are flooded and leaching acids  into the river" my mother warned.  Pollution undetectable to my eye and descriptions of microscopic toxins were a strange wonderment to me, the small child who peered into a barren watery landscape, too perfectly crystal clear looking for signs of life, water plants, turtles, beetles, snails and strides.   
They were non existent!

In my big back yard I looked for diminished quail, pheasant, wood ducks, red fox, it was easier to find lichen, arrow heads, fossilized shells, than the once abundant trailing arbutus, and ground orchids.  I  became gravely aware of endangered plants and animals in the sparse felled woods, abandoned fields, in the atrophic green algae blooms in Fishing Creek from fertilizer and farm runoff.  I learned at an early age the necessity of healthy bios-systems and to respect and protect the invisible and the maligned bats, skunks, possums, snakes and spiders.

My grandparents on both sides had farms with live stock, vegetable and flower gardens.  My mother was a zoologist with a passionate interest in birds and American shells and the microscopic.  My father was an outdoors man and a naturalist.  My parents spent a lot of time outdoors observing and teaching me.  We explored flora and fauna in the Pennsylvania's woods, meadows, creeks and river and in the early 50's in the Florida Keys, the islands, hammocks and flats and reefs of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

I attended 7th and 8th grade in a one room school house in Marathon, Fl.  The principle and only teacher Mr. Guthrie focused lessons on the surrounding natural world rather than the formal studies of sentence diagramming.

I attended summer school at Penn State University taking art history and painting classes from famed art teacher Hobson Pitman on loan each summer from the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.

I  graduated from the School of Architecture and Design in 1961, with a B.S. in Design from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.  I majored in painting at a time when abstract expressionism was being taught and all my instructors were male.   I minored in ceramics.

After graduation I moved to in New York City  where I lived on the lower east side with fellow artists and sold my work in several Greenwich Village Art Galleries. My boyfriend, wildlife artist George L. Schelling and I opened an art gallery in Clinton, N.J. in the late 60's. My  paintings are of lessor known plants and animals and  bio systems.  I describes myself as a patternist.  I won the National Academy of Design Purchase award in late sixties for the Henry Ward Ranger Fund for 24 x 30 watercolor "Black Organic Form"   I moved to Key West, Florida in 1969 where I remain today, I  opened an art gallery of Botanical and Zoological Paintings in 1975 which continues to this day.  I displayed and sold wildlife art, contemporary environmental art and origin antique natural history prints. 

I have been a mentor to creative  for 35 years. By sharing my lifestyle, my philosophy, my art, my home, my guest cottage and garden with creative people, visionary thinkers, and naturalists.  I have sought to elevate the role of art and artists in society especially eco-art and artists that activate humans to save what is left of our natural world.

In 1993 I opened a type of Land Art to the public to co create an unforgetable experience  and save the land from developement.  I performed daily.  It came to be known as Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden.   Site Specific Art  Dec 1993 - Dec 2003

I was Creator and President of Mana Project 501(c)(3)  Circa 1993-2012  Mana is a Polynesian word meaning positive creative force.  Mana's mission is to preserve a piece of Land Art known as Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden for the benefit of the earth, the arts, and the artist. To serve the community and visiting public as site dedicated to environmental educational  in order to create activists.

When the Secret Garden was lost in 2012 I continued to teach the public with my orphaned parrots.  
I currently practice The Art of Storytelling to stop parrot abuse.

I continue to live and work at my home/studio in Key West, Fl.   It has been my home/studio since 1969.  I am working on a book called Beauty with a Purpose,  Garden Games and Extinction Jokes based on my interaction and co-creation with my public art work known as  "Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden"

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It is now October 2021.  I am compiling a comprehensive autobiography.   ​I am using an outline to revise and add all of my life's milestones in chronological order .  It will be long and in time it will be complete.  It will be including important dates, places lived, schooling, marriages, ritual and spiritual practices, important people and events in my life and paradigm shifts in my thinking and work as an artist.

I am often asked  "What is your favorite Animal?"

My favorite animals are Nudibranchs  or sea slugs

I am often asked  "What is your favorite Plant?"

My favorite plant is a Sprouting Sweet Potatoe

​NANCY FORRESTER’S SECRET GARDEN (Nancy)
I held a solitary ritual to celebrate the open to my garden to the public on 
Christmas Day, 1993. Candle, incense flowers words special garb  an interactive
experience Most people related to it as one would a botanical garden. 
A few got it and understood it was ART, site specific art.  These people were 
& still are very special & necessary to my feelings of self worth and sanity!  
Most humans were swept up in the botanical garden aspect of plants failing to
feel the place, listen & comprehend it struggle for survival & my 
environmental message. The majority of people what they experience as 
come focused on see the many rare plants from strange places. . It was Dennis 
Reeves Cooper of ‘Key West the Newspaper’ who coined the experssion ‘Nancy 
Forrester’s Secret Garden’.  It became a tourist attraction. People arrived
through Free School Alley Lane, which was 
unpaved coral rock lane off Simonton Street. I liked the name Free School 
Alley  and so did others because the city street sign keep being stolen 
as a souvenir.  Somewhere in my b;ockwas the site of a the first free public
school for the Conchs.  one side on the lane was covered with black tar and became 
a parking lot for an  atomobile to display cars for sale.  
 houses were built: first two on one side, then Doolin on the
other. At the end of the Lane was the  wooden gate made by 
Paul through which people entered my garden. . On the left there was on-site parking, with space for some camper 
vans where my friends could stay which could stay if they wanted. . Whole inside of the block 
It was the last undeveloped wooded acre of land in old Key West. Shock in old town When 
people came in they felt they were entering a rainforest; 
It was certainly ’secret': people were astounded it existed right in the middle 
of the town, just one block from Duval Street. I designed this project/garden 
as ART at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston,and was blown away by the 
possibilities of the medium for environmental messaging  . I constructed my man made rainforest with living plant material, 
creating the greatest density possible with the most diverse patterns textures 
and colors I could find to save the lives of billions of exotic animals precious creatures.
 Site specific art means that the artists takes the site into consideration for the artwork; it 
cannot exist without it. Normally site specific art has a beginning and end 
time, but my artwork to save the site  Save the site from developement
I designed the space to be so dense disorienting you could lose you way or barings 
and have no idea how big the space was and so the foligae brushed your 
body as you moved thru the pathes and hidden garden rooms. Or what possible creature might jump out at you It was 
designed to jangle the senses.  Inside the gate  there was a small room or 
space made by were [three Big Queen Sago Palms not palms but Cycads 
whose leaves were a very shiny dark green almost black armed with typical 
spikes and big and dense dense and meant that you could not see what lay ahead  
walking on you were offered a choise of  three paths. one straight ahead one to the left one to the rightA choicie had to be made. most people trasversed to the right When you walked down the paths you could never see how big or 
small the area was it was; and people never knew what they would find 
around the bend.  I designed 3 foot wide mulched paths that meandered 
under big trees shading intimate ‘garden rooms’.  Bricks and pavers were not 
allow . was it was created to be primarily sensual,feeling but people insisted on living in their head 
normal educational and cultural uses of garden: for some (my desire) it was a haven of peace 
for others fear.; people wanted to relate to it as usual have a picnica wedding a funeral a barmitza place for a privte catered dinner paint a bring a lunch
picture; they brought their painting easels and there were none to borrow. 
painting easels you could borrow. Visitors read books and wrote poetry.  
People are strong willed and set in their ways.  I wanted feeling hearts and 
guts  My goal was to grow active environmentalists and save 
this Sacred Land and its myrid life forms  from extinction  I wantd to kick 
start everyone to be the rabid protecting the natural world.  I charged a fixed amount per 
human, and gave no discounts for children. Parents were upset by this, but 
I wanted to make clear that each human has an impact on the environment. 
 I also did not label my plants. I once 
received a call from Carol, the owner of the upmarket Marquesa Hotel, that a 
Very Important Person would come to town, and that she had a garden of her 
own in New England, and could I be ready and wait for her at the entrance! 
She walked in majestically, took one look, and asked whether the plants were 
labeled.I said they weren’t. She huffed, said that she could not relate to that, 
turned around and left. It was exactly what I wanted: I did not just want 
people to come watch a garden and read the labels; I wanted them to feel
the garden. She looked a bit like my grandmother, The Wicked Witch.
I had orchids, bamboo, bromeliad, and air plants from all over the world. 
I had more than one hundred different species of palms and ferns, and 
vast quantities of aroids. The aroids especially made it look jungly: they 
are the large elephant ears, which make for exotic succulent lush foliage. I 
had vines - my emerald vines were second to none​I had fruit trees:  I had sugar apple, canistal  4 
avocados and a three big sapodillas.and two huge Spanish Limes 
D Never heard that They become huge trees and people 
prefer swimming pools to big trees
There were no iguanas then 
There was a beautil big well shaped thriving breadfruit tree: Breadfruit have beautiful large leaves with deep 
lobes  w
because when the enormous ripe bread fruits fall, they cause a lot of 
mess.and attract ants and flying insects 
Many of my plants were rare and endangered, given as gifts by Jeff Searle and formed a gene pool 
which could keep the species alive. For example, I had cycads, one of the 
most endangered plant group on earth, a leftover from the time of the 
dinosaurs! 
I had beautiful big tree ferns
It’s true that hurricanes regularly defoliated the canopy which crashed and 
crushed the mid and under-story half the garden.
One of my favorite plants was the incredibly weird amorphophallus 
paeonifolius, also known as the elephant foot yam [check whether Nancy 
had this YES]. In Africa and Southeast Asia it’s a vegetable grown as a cash 
crop. It’s almost impossible to describe. It blooms for just five days at the 
beginning of the rainy season. Cylindrical masses of purple flowers 
emerge from a corm; that’s a short vertical swollen underground plant 
stem. The flowers give off a putrid, pungent smell that serves to attract 
the pollinating insects. On the first day of the bloom the female flowers 
attract the insects and trap them inside the flower for the night, so the 
pollen on the insects is transferred to the stigmas. Within a day the female 
flowers develop into bright red ovoid berries. While the flowers are in 
bloom they also produce heat.
Another favorite was my Spanish lime trees. They was huge and majestic; 
with many mighty branches. It must have been more than one hundred 
years old and was planted by the early settlers to bring wood ? and fruit to 
the island. It bore a lot of fruit the size of ping pong balls, similar to 
when blooming they laid down a chartreuse carpet of very small flowers 
about an inch thicklychee. It tastes sort of sweet and sour. It was a lush tree, providing shade. 
‘Under the lime trees’ was a typical romantic meeting place for lovers. 
Visitors to the garden were encouraged to spend time sitting or standing 
under the tree to feel it’s life force.
A professor of botany told me he could teach two semesters just about the 
plants in my garden. It looked and felt like the amazon rainforest! It was 
Jurassic Park sans the dinosaurs. 
Animals arrived on their own, attracted by the welcoming greenery. 
Cuban tree frogs made a racket. There were many different kinds of 
insects; land mollusks and birds. 
Out of nowhere, seven different kinds of snakes arrived from the early 
1970s onwards. Thankfully the visitors never saw them, as they came out 
at night. I have a photo somewhere of a long coral and burgundy striped 
Scarlet King Snake on my Caryota palm. In the evening when we took the 
parrots in, we always emptied their food trays, but left the water. One 
day we found a magnificent Corn red snake inside a cage. It had gone in 
to drink from the parrots’ water, but has also eaten a frog or a rat or 
something, and now part of it’s body was so bloated that it couldn’t 
slither through the cage bars to get out! I took many photos of it: it was so 
pretty: it had contrasting silver and red and orange and pink and white 
markings. Corn snakes are beneficial because they get rid of rodents. 
They subdue their small prey by constriction. 
I also had giant spiders. 
And then came the parrots. I didn’t really want them, but they came 
anyway. For the kids visiting the parrots were top draw. And the birds 
loved the kids: some parrots had been owned by children. 
I never used pesticides in my Secret Garden. And because of that George 
from the Key West butterfly & Nature Conservatory asked for some of the 
butterfly weed we grew. He couldn’t obtain it anywhere else so pure. 

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