We seek peace in our own lives through meditation and the study of the Dharma (the traditional Buddhist teachings). We contribute to peace in our communities through ecological restoration, as a remedy for some of the violence done by development.
At our Wild Plant Nursery and the field sites that it serves, we work to conserve the native plant communities of the greater Washington region, home to one of the richest floras in eastern North America. Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola is conserving the forests of central Hispaniola, the richest surviving remnant of the Caribbean forest biome, a global biodiversity hotspot.
We see ecological restoration as essential to conservation because many natural areas are now too small and isolated to persist over the long term in their current state. In the greater Washington region, we are reestablishing forests and meadows on degraded sites. In central Hispaniola, our Tree Bank farmers are replanting native forest on their lands.
As part of our effort to promote ecological literacy, we sometimes supply schools in the greater DC area with plants from our Wild Plant Nursery; we also offer advice on how to landscape with native plants. At several schools, we have worked in partnership with other groups or individual people interested in creating greener schoolyards. Our principal school partner is another DC-area nonprofit, Lands and Waters. Since 2005, we have supplied plants to about 30 schoolyard projects.
If your DC-area school is organizing a native plant garden, please feel free to contact us. If you would like to obtain plants from us, it would be a good idea to get in touch as early in your planning as possible. Please note that, while we can offer some free plants to worthy schoolyard projects every year, we do have to limit the number of freebies. (Even nonprofits have production costs.)
There are no school greening updates at present.
You can see some of our school planting activities in this School Greening slide show.
An unusual note of appreciation! In October 2008, Janette Mason, a teacher at Randolph Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, sent us an illustrated thank-you poem from one of her third-grade students, who had participated in a class planting. (Note particularly the bird in the tree.)
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Planting at Kimball Elementary.
Lisa explains seeds at Centreville Elementary.
Planting a stormpond at the Howard Gardner School.
A stream-buffer planting at Franklin Middle School.
Vegetable gardening at Kimball Elementary.
Landscaping at Daniels Run Elementary.
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Above: Scenes from a few school projects.