GardenWild's Mission
Outside of the Great Plains, the Piedmont Prairie is one of the world's only other tallgrass prairies. Historically, it stretched from Maryland south through the Carolinas, following the "fall line," bordered by oak and pine savannahs to the east and the vast Atlantic temperate rainforest to the west. Central Virginia served as a crucial intersection and transitional zone for these diverse ecosystems. Today, less than 1% of these intact tracks of old-growth temperate rainforest or Piedmont Prairie remain protected, and even those "protected" areas are now under imminent threat of destruction.
Our “Native Habitat Enhancement” installations are curated in an attempt to bridge the gap between your immediate local ecosystem needs, and larger tracts of wilderness nearby. This conscious action on your part represents direct and immediate intervention to help keep Virginia’s natural heritage & beauty alive and the beginning of your individual journey, of lasting legacy for generations to come.
Whether it's an existing landscaped area or flowerbed that has become overgrown and unsightly, or a shady corner of your yard where nothing will grow. We design our installations to fit into your existing landscaping, with minimal site preparation, and enhance the direct wildlife value your yard offers. The goal is not to “rip out and replace” , but to work with what you have, where you are, and to do what we can to maximize the long-term wildlife value while balancing aesthetics. “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have” is one of those quotes, and ways of life that was instilled in me at a very early age thanks to my elders, and is still a persistent core tenet of how I approach everyday life.
Prioritizing habitat doesn't have to mean messy and overgrown eyesores. While it's true that wildlife views a habitat much differently than we as humans do, it doesn't mean that you have to devote a corner of your yard to being “truly wild”, no matter how beneficial that may be for them. The beauty in our native plant species is an immense and nearly endless well to pull from. You don't have to sacrifice aesthetics, for wildlife benefit. Our “Native Habitat Enhancement” Installations are designed to seamlessly enhance, or often merely uncover, the natural beauty in your wild spaces by immediately increasing species diversity in an aesthetically pleasing way. I truly believe we can coexist within ecosystems comfortably, while also prioritizing those systems' well-being, with its overall health in mind.
In modern times we live in a landscape of fragmented ecosystems, ghost-like remnants of once flourishing giants, often replaced by manicured lawns & invasive species that are more profitable to reproduce on mass-scales. While state and national parks protect some of our last wild areas, there remains a significant gap in connecting these vital spaces. More than 80% of all “wild space “ is currently owned by private landowners. Installing plants is always a beneficial addition to any yard, but installing or enhancing entire habitats offers exponentially greater impact. This transforms a small corner into a single link, becoming part of a larger, growing chain of "wildlife corridors." I want to use my "Habitat Enhancement" installations and create these vital spaces to help stitch back together our tattered wild places, one backyard at a time.
Natural wildlife corridors can be found along old dirt roads, powerline and gas pipeline rights-of-way, and even in unkept corners of your property. These corridors can emerge without human intervention, or often because of it , thanks to the "seed bank" found in undisturbed soils where seeds can lie dormant for decades awaiting the right conditions. Many of these ecosystems need disruption to exist, especially prairies. Historically this disruption would've been caused by the grazing of large ruminants like Buffalo or Red Elk, and especially by fire. Today, it's most often by annual mowing or development. By installing native species, your yard immediately becomes a vital "pitstop" for wildlife traversing our fragmented landscape, directly contributing to the local seed bank as they consume the seed and fruit and spread it along their journey. In the following years they mature into a proverbial ark, saving and distributing the genetics back into the environment directly. Making sure we have native seeds to fill in these disturbed areas, instead of opportunistic “invasives” who thrive in the same conditions, is paramount to making sure these species continue to exist in the wild.
At a time when the future of our protected wild spaces is increasingly at risk, this mission couldn't be more important.
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Want to get involved?
If you are a local business owner who would like to get involved with GardenWild Services & Our mission to bring holistic land management practices into suburbia in an effort to create vital wildlife corridors in every space possible... please reach out directly. Whether business partnerships, deals, or future volunteer oppurtunities - Im grateful for it all.
If you would like to donate directly to Kaleb Meade to help him build his dream of making this happen through GardenWild Services, you can do so by cashapp $GardenWildServices