Despite being a scion of the Fairhope Lumber Company, a family-owned clearcutting business that aided and abetted in the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Daphne’s interests turned to nature and the earth early. Cast out and partly disinherited after a logging protest led to the destruction of three logging trucks, she now spends her time living on a “landslip” house on a private Maine island, running a surprisingly successful mail-order wildflower business, FlowahPowah. She often has a protegé, but has left a trail of broken and exiled protegés who were cast off for being insufficiently committed to the environment. The irony of this situation seems entirely lost on her. With her second cousin J. Winthrope Fairhope in ill health and childless, there is a very real possibility that she might inherit what remains of the Fairhope empire upon his expiry.

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