Wood meadows, Hope Garden, Estonia
🌪️
This is how it’s feeling at the moment. All of the various streams from all of my various lives are coming together in a tumultuous torrent of confluence.
Hope Garden
Firstly, we have been awarded the grant to create the Hope Garden💚! This is a ”Community Assembly at the heart of a wildlife forest garden”. It is about bringing people together in creating habitat for wildlife and growing resilient food. The “we” in this instance is Garden Wild Plants CIC and a very talented crew of climate committed co-workers.
Estonia Ecological Restoration Conference
And my part-time employer, the council, have agreed that my trip to the 14th European Conference on Ecological Restoration to research wood meadows can be taken under the auspices of the Biodiversity Team, which means I get paid rather than having to take it as holiday!
I still have to find the money for the ticket, hotel, travel & expenses and I’m about £400 short, so my fundraiser is ongoing:
ko-fi.com/natureworks/goal?g=43
Meadows group
And my job at the council is going really well. I’ve been very busy setting up a Ceredigion meadows group. Really, I think it’s going to be more grasslands, for cultural and practical reasons. But wood meadows is featuring very highly on my input into the group. I’ve met some amazing and talented people the past couple of months, visited some beautiful sites buzzing with life, and had great conversations about Results Based Payments (seriously, this is major).
Wood meadows
Which leads me on to wood meadows. I really feel they are like community forest gardens at a landscape scale. And there is potential to harness the desire and need to recommon and redistribute our natural wealth. Much of the available funding for a wood meadows project is capital funding. The key idea is to bring the land back into common ownership using this capital funding, and back into direct, democratic control of resources.
This ties in really well with the Community Assembly aspect of the Hope Garden. And who doesn’t like more democracy (apart from autocrats & megacorps around the world, of course).
I have a whole series of essays planned about wood meadows, which I will start writing this week. Here’s just a taster of some ideas:
Wood meadows: a model, not a blueprint
Wood meadows: the hotdog approach to ecology 🌭 - make me one with everything
Wood meadows as archive - habitat, species and skills
Wood meadows as an antidote to fascism
Etc
To all the people who signed up for forest gardens and ended up with wood meadows, these things are connected, it just seems that there’s a lot of thinking and planning around them all. I am so looking forward to getting my hands dirty again with the Hope Garden and dealing more with plants than spreadsheets.
Hwyl am y tro! Bye for now!
Jake