The Forager’s Meadow™

Grow and gather wild plants. Seed a permanent food system. Meadows are the art of flowers and grasses run amok. They are also an expression of something that resides within ourselves. Meadows are the original human ecosystem. Evolutionary biology traces our origins back to these grassy places, where we foraged in the undergrowth, amid the occasional scattered savanna tree. Even now, social scientists can detect an unconscious bias toward grassy places, especially among young children. It’s no surprise then that we recreate meadows everywhere we go. Our ubiquitous lawns, for example, while ecologically boring, fit the technical definition of a grassland or meadow. Our wastelands and abused places also usually remake themselves as new kinds of meadows – every crack in civilization’s pavement sprouts a new blade of grass. Eventually the cracks coalesce into new weedy meadow ecosystems. Abandoned shopping malls, vacant lots, and rusted factories become assemblages of dandelions, buried pla