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But Sui Ching insists and, for once, her husband, Jack, follows her lead, and so the family heads south to the “twenty hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland” that now belong to her.

She says she had been stuck in France for two months, after travelling there from Vietnam via Hungary, sleeping in tents in a scrubby forest.

Setting fires in the Sandhills of central North Carolina requires an understanding of moisture levels in the scrubby underbrush, and she gets a better sense of it in bare feet.

Stretching more than 8,000 square miles, Kern is the state’s third-largest county by land area and encompasses varied topography, from arid desert to scrubby grassland and mountain forests.

A billionaire-backed vision to erect an idealistic new city on scrubby grassland in rural Solano County is one step closer to becoming reality.