Western North Carolina has long been a home to those out-of-step with mainstream culture looking for land to settle on, and in many cases, live communally.

When I covered the area for public radio stations and later newspapers, you could stumble into Love Valley and environs in the ’80s and find ’60s hippies holed-up, still living a Back to the Land ethos, some engaged in the business of building and selling hot air balloons.

It was a testing ground for everybody who had an idea of living naturally — underground, earth-covered houses and geodesic domes that needed little or no heat or AC, gardens on your roof and the like.

And over Burnsville way, mountain man/prophet Joe Hollis carried on his 50 years-and-counting “experiment” in growing and gathering nature’s bounty of healing and nourishing herbs in Mountain Garden, an oasis of simple, off-the-grid living in nature.

Hollis took on apprentices and followers whom he taught to identify and use the sea of plants — native and local, Chinese herbs and others — he could name on sight — ginseng and sansai, wild mountain ramps and wasabi.

Asheville filmmaker Garrett Martin spent six months with Hollis, then in his 80s and in failing health, to document what he’s been doing since the early ’70s and his efforts to pass on what he’s learned, what he believes and what he’s built to a new generation.

Martin follows Hollis through the forest’s extended garden, past cabins and yurts and circular hillside bungalows inspired by yurts, pointing out “the plant that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother,” the ginseng and ramps and everything else in his internet-famous “paradise garden.”

We meet apprentices and acolytes, many of whom have settled there, who heard of of Hollis’s “experiment” in living off the land in “the garden where everything you need is there for the taking” and gravitated there.

“The plant wizard” was obessed with ensuring that his “experiment” continue, and that like-minded followers know about this place so that they can come to it, learn from him and his extensive library and perhaps settle there or find some other piece of rural “paradise” to try this themselves.

The film captures Hollis preparing for his own death like the philosopher he was, consulting not hospice workers but those well read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with his followers scrambling to rebuild the garden’s library and garden after a devastating fire from a few years earlier as a final living tribute to the man.

We meet his ex wife and his son, watch ducks waddle through the forest and creeks and see one slaughtered for a meal. But the overview of life there lacks much in the way of practical application — details on which herbs he’s cultivating, hunting down and turning into “tinctures” and the like for this or that “natural” cure or treatment for what ails you.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joe Hollis

Credits: Garret Martin. A Gravitas Ventures release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:12