After many years as a successful documentary film producer and director, Michael Poole found himself suffering from serious bumout. Retreating from the demands of the city to a waterfront acreage on British Columbia’s idyllic Sunshine Coast, he threw himself into wholesome toil: the cultivation of marijuana. Romancing Mary Jane is an intimate, funny and eye-opening depiction of ten months in the life of a neophyte marijuana grower. It is also an entertaining examination of cannabis culture. As he plants and cultivates his crop in the company of hummingbirds, woodpeckers, eagles, biting flies and a bear who shows signs of reefer madness, Poole ruminates on many things: the age-old use of mind-altering drugs; the wrong-headedness of drug laws; the medical use of pot; the genetic diversity of the lovely marijuana plant. Poole embarked on this life of crime with the idea that he’d make a bundle, live like a lord and loll away the winters on tropical beaches. Things didn’t work out quite that way. But what he discovers instead, on a mountaintop overlooking the deep blue water of the Strait of Georgia, is a reconnection to landscape, weather and the turning of the seasons—not to mention some of the best pot he has ever smoked.