We’re not just about replacing your lawn with an artfully designed meadow or prairie garden. We’re also about teaching and empowering you to grow with your plants, to create corridors of habitat and islands of refuge that bring us all home together – bird and frog, butterfly and wasp, spider and bee and human. We want to see lawns used with purpose in our urban landscapes — not as default, high-input carpeting, but with intention as pathways, seating or picnic areas, and negative space to help us experience the wilder landscape.
As we first convert stressed patches of monoculture grass or expanses that are difficult / expensive to maintain, we get closer to a complete paradigm shift where instead of new sod being laid on a new build, prairie plugs are installed or flower seed is sown.
In a time of climate disruption and mass extinction, it’s time to prairie up and unlawn America. We’re here to take the journey with you, from beginner to advanced gardener, from the home to school to place of worship to business park.
Any time an urban lawn is replaced with a sustainable, natural landscape, it will turn heads. You've now created a breach in the status quo, and as herd animals the new landscape will be seen as a threat. It's not always the research and install that is the hard, good work -- it can often be the advocacy. That being said, 99% of our installed landscapes are met with awareness of the issues and interest in the process and outcomes. The tide is turning -- we're here to help you turn it even more.
It isn’t just for the middle prairie states, especially as prairie / meadow / savanna exists in almost every state in the lower 48 – from the Palouse in the Pacific Northwest to the Piedmont on the east coast, to longleaf pine savannas of the southeast, the Hempstead Plains on Long Island, the Sandhills of Nebraska, and the Carizzo Plain of California. Prairie or meadow garden design is a perfect first step toward healing a post-lawn landscape, an early-succession process in rebuilding soil and food webs no matter if the climax landscape is more diverse prairie plants or a woodland. But most important of all is to garden locally.
“Prairie up” is a call to action to rethink pretty, to rewild, and to rekindle are relationship with other species of flora and fauna that literally make our world work. That journey of empathy and listening to the voices and learning from the culture of other species will empower us beyond the garden in ways we can’t fully imagine. Prairie up is about defiant compassion for an uncertain future, about cultivating a new environmental and social ethic in the face of mass extinction and climate disruption.
When we prairie up, we fuel hope through action, cultivate meaningful change, and make a stand of beauty for all species and not just one privileged species.
