Project in Forming:

Rewilding Heathcote’s Land Garden

Heathcote’s 44-acres is a mixed-use residential, utility, and activities property. It may be far different from the dense urban development of Baltimore City, but it is not the countryside it was. In general, the site offers a great deal of space, access to water, and most of it is easily accessible to vehicles, but forest fragmentation and degradation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and Baltimore’s sometimes short-sighted land-use planning present specific restoration challenges. Baltimore County’s planning desertified the countryside in order to preserve it, concentrating services and economic development while stranding populations and biomes, separating city from country and biomes from continuity.

This history has left a site with yet unrealized rewilding potential for both human use and environmental regeneration, healing and restoring, reimagining doing and being. Re-imaginings include vertical farming, cultivated foraging, and restorative agro-ecology on floodplain and slopes. The existing farming infrastructure of two high-tunnels, a spring-time greenhouse, terraced plots, and river floodplain plots can form the developmental nucleus of a resilient garden-based activity and living center.

In 2020, Heathcote Farm was expanded for commercial production, without holistic integration into land-use and the needs of participants. Prior to that time, garden production was on a smaller scale and intended only for use by Heathcote residents.

Action in 2023

In 2023, production will be targeted toward activity participants and residents, but emphasis will be placed on human and garden investment according to identified targets.

Heathcote will open the call reconnection of urban and rural growers. Inviting already skilled

artists
landscape architects
farmers
herbal healers
community activists

to participate in the design process, remaking the wooded, cleared, and built-spaces as an integrated inclusive garden destination and exchange space. Heathcote will strive to develop and beautify our space and yours through garden-based activity, education, and social, political, and economic convergence.

We will need to build a development time-frame, an organizational structure, an overall design of circulation and gathering spaces, scheduling of group work days, and a list of materials and specific projects. However, the first necessary step is to define and map our initial stakeholders. Beyond the irregular wooded areas on slopes we are starting with these among other principle existing assets: