Meadow-Making and our Relationship to the Land

Although most local farmers and gardeners have been struggling to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in this cool rainy spring, anyone walking through the woods has probably noticed the abundant beauty of the wildflowers. The fawn lily meadows along the river by my house seemed to bloom for two months this year, and the Nootka Roses growing along the back roads are laden with cascading delicate pink flowers. And this year is definitely going to be remembered as the juiciest berry season the west coast has seen in a long while.

At the Resiliency Project, the network of community meadows have been drinking deeply too, and the spring bloom has been beautiful. This is a rewilding initiative at the Cowichan Green Community, with a focus on planting native wildflower meadows throughout the community to feed the pollinators, butterflies, moths, and other beneficial insects that support the entire food web. One of the reasons that planting native wildflowers is so impactful is that there is an intricate series of relationships that exist between the native species of plants and the native species of insects, relationships that have co-evolved over thousands of years. This means that these particular plants provide more energy to the food web than other non-native species that we might be accustomed to growing in our gardens and yards. One of the aims of the Resiliency Project is to reintroduce these beautiful native flowers to backyard gardeners and farmers, and encourage everyone to reintegrate these important plants into our shared community landscape.

As we move further into this age of climate instability and chaos, there is such a calling in many of us to take meaningful action, and planting native species in our own yards and gardens is one expression of our love and care for the earth and all of the creatures we share this land with. It has a tangible positive ecological impact! Rewilding can be done in so many ways, from planting a few native wildflowers along the edge of your vegetable garden to digging up your entire lawn to plant a native wildflower meadow. This doesn’t mean that we have to abandon all of the non-native varieties of flowers that are so dear to many of us, but it is an invitation to shift our focus with gardening from aesthetics alone, to seeing our garden as a space that has the potential to contribute to the health of the wider ecosystem.

“Butterflies used to reproduce on the native plants that grew in our yards before the plants were bulldozed and replaced with lawn. To have butterflies in our future, we need to replace those lost host plants, no if’s, and’s or but’s. If we do not, butterfly populations will continue to decline with every new house that is built.” - Douglas Tallamy, entomologist and author of Nature’s Best Hope

For anyone interested in joining the group of volunteers at the Resiliency Project, or accessing the community native seed bank, find us at www. cowichangreencommunity.org or come by the Cowichan Farm and Food Hub at 2431 Beverly St for a selection of native plants and seeds.