It turns out that money grows on trees in Nepal

Puwamajhuwa, Nepal: The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea plantations of India’s Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on the lush hillsides.

But life can be hard. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Mount Everest. He gave up on those plants a dozen years ago and resorted to growing one that seemed to have little value: argeli, a yellow-flowered evergreen shrub found wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grew it for fences or firewood.

Sherpa had no idea that the bark torn from his algeri would one day become pure money: the result of an unusual trade in which one of the poorest areas of Asia provides a main ingredient for the economy of one of the richest. .

Japanese currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be obtained at home. The Japanese love their old yen bills, and they need mountains of new ones this year, so Sherpa and his neighbors have a lucrative reason to preserve their hillsides.