Native gardening: functional and educational

Come the summer, campers at the French Woods Festival for the Arts will have access to a whole new avenue for appreciating the natural world. 

Working with Mama Garden Co. and Terre Moto Landscape Architecture, French Woods has installed a perennial pollinator meadow as a landscaping feature and as a living classroom. The meadow hosts over 800 native plants, including foxglove, yarrow, inkberry, allium, goldenrod, beebalm, catmint and feverfew, as well as edible herbs, including oregano, thyme, dill and mint. 

The meadow will give French Woods campers hands-on experience with the wonders of the natural world, wonder they may not have easy access to in their daily lives. It also demonstrates the possibilities of incorporating native plants in landscape design. 

Going native

The project took some time to come to fruition. 

Jessica Lewis of Mama Garden Co. has been working with French Woods to rehabilitate its landscape for the past two years. 

“Initially, the goal was simple: create something beautiful and low maintenance,” Lewis says. “But that naturally led to a conversation about perennial natives—plants that thrive with minimal input and offer long-term resilience.”

Native perennials can adapt to their local environment and help make it thrive, something annual plants or high-maintenance lawns struggle to do. Lewis says the plants they work with can help rebuild their soil, manage stormwater and support biodiversity. “It’s not just sustainable—it’s regenerative,” she says. “We’re trying to give more back to the land than we take.”

French Woods met the idea of going native with open excitement, something that isn’t always true for a landscaping client. 

The landscaping industry as a whole has a lot of what Lewis calls “conventional thinking,” she says—focusing on appearances at the cost of an environment’s health. 

“But that’s starting to change as more clients ask for sustainable solutions and as professionals become more educated about the role our work plays in resilient landscapes and the broader scope of our local ecosystems,” Lewis says. 

A place to grow

The focus on creating an eco-sensitive landscape doesn’t just help the natural world, but also enriches the minds of the kids who will inhabit it. 

French Woods offers programs in all forms of art—from theatre and music to dance and circus and beyond—for campers ages seven to 16. 

“As a camp rooted in the creative arts, we believe deeply in inspiring young people to explore and create with all their senses,” says Michael Knauf, camp director. “This new landscape project helps bridge the gap between art and nature, offering our campers an opportunity to engage with and be inspired by living systems. 

Lewis says that she’s found the kids at the camp to be very engaged, willing to come up to her and her crew and ask them about the work they’re doing. 

“Kids are very observant and curious, and many of the kids at the camp are from concrete jungles without any real opportunity to have meaningful interactions with nature,” she says. “Giving them direct access to a living landscape can spark a kind of lifelong engagement.”

Because the garden will be full of native plants, integrated with the surrounding environment, it will offer campers not just engagement with flowers or herbs, but a chance to connect with the broader ecosystem around them. 

“A camper might watch a monarch caterpillar on milkweed or see a hummingbird return day after day,” says Lewis. “Those small moments create a relationship with the land that’s hard to replicate in a classroom.”