This seminar offers students the opportunity to design, seed, and maintain a meadow at Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory. In pairs, students are responsible for researching, designing and planting a 500-square-foot plot. While each team has the chance to test their own ideas, parcels are not treated in isolation. Rather, we consider the edge conditions between plots and how the cumulative 4,000-square-foot site functions ecologically and spatially. Stewardship of the site is passed to new students every academic year and each class will add to and edit the evolving meadow.

A meadow is typically described as an area of land that is dominated by grasses and other non-woody plants. In this seminar, we will define meadow broadly: a field that contains a high diversity of perennials, annuals, natives and non-native herbaceous species, providing habitat, nectar, pollen, and seeds for wildlife and a rich sensory experience for human visitors. Our meadow may be sparsely populated by small trees or woody shrubs provided that an open character is maintained.