Gardening for Life Project
Celebrating ways we can all make a difference to
preserve and protect biodiversity in the Carolina Foothills and beyond.
Conservation begins at home.
Following the outrageous success of the Gardening For Life Celebration 2023, the GFLP Team is at it again!
We hope you will join us for this free community event. The celebration will include a dynamic conservation speaker, educational exhibits, a native plant sale, a free drawing, connections with community resources and more.
Focus Areas of the 2024 Celebration:
Guest Speaker: Jim McCormac. This in-demand speaker is an award-winning author, botantist, conservationist, and an acclaimed photographer. Join us as we explore the mysterious and miraculous world of moths and the critical role they play in pollination and biodiversity.
Education on, and access to, native plants of our region via exhibits and a native plant sale with many of our region’s finest growers
Exploring the detrimental effects of invasive species to our region and the solutions
Encouraging a shift in thinking from “the problems are too big” to “together we can make a difference!”
A bit of backstory …
The GFLP is an all-volunteer community initiative that began out of a lively conversation between friends. We were discussing Doug Tallamy’s ground-breaking book, Nature’s Best Hope. Doug shares the hopeful message that, while there is an urgent need to address the ecological threats to our planet, we can each make a meaningful difference by simply beginning right outside our door, in our yards and neighborhoods. Stewardship and conservation begin at home.
With this in mind, we began to explore ways that we could share this message of hope and action with our community. Thus, the Gardening For Life Project was born.
Our first thought - “We need to bring Doug to town!” And that we did on March 4th, 2023 for the first Gardening For Life Celebration. The event was a full-on community happening with native plants vendors, educational exhibits by environmentally focused community organizations, and with none other than Doug Tallamy as our speaker. While this was a free community event, all 700 tickets for seats were reserved two months before the actual event! It was a huge success (read: Community Impact) leaving attendees and the larger community asking, “What’s Next?”
Well, the Gardening For Life Celebration 2024 and more!
GFLP Guiding Principles:
Our team believes that individually and collectively, we can improve the health of our communities and our planet, and that improvement starts right in our own yards.
By making simple changes, such as choosing native over exotic plants and removing invasive plants, we can begin to restore habitat at home, at our businesses and throughout the region.
The Gardening for Life Project promotes resources, tools and organizations that help to make these changes possible. We invite you to explore our Learning Center.
Why Gardening for Life?
By cultivating and protecting healthy diverse habitats, we are protecting all facets of life: life for pollinators, for wildlife, for healthy flora and fauna, for the individuals who live in and enjoy these spaces and for our community, as a whole.
We invite individuals, businesses and community organizations to be a part of this ongoing initiative. You can do this in many ways.