In the United States more than 90 percent of fruit tree and vegetable varieties found in farmers' fields at the beginning of the twentieth century are no longer there.
The grounds encompass two guest houses, a tennis court, several greenhouses, a tree house, rose and vegetable gardens, and a second hidden driveway entrance onto the property.
Outside I could see a half dozen wooden stilt homes surrounded by muddy patches and palm trees, a clothesline hung with shirts and sarongs, tree branch kindling stacked under a storage shed, a scrabbly vegetable garden where smoke plumed from a dying fire.