Meadowscaping for Biodiversity

Meadowscaping for Biodiversity (MS4B)

Meadowscaping for Biodiversity (MS4B) is a project-based STEAM-learning outdoors environmental education program. MS4B offers two types of programs. We offer the Meadow Club as a specialty summer camp or afterschool program at select schools and camps. Youth age 7 - 14 learn about biodiversity, ecology, and earth stewardship while repurposing unproductive turf lawn into pollinator patches and meadows filled with native plants, shrubs, and grasses...and bees and butterflies.

The Youth Environmental Entrepreneurship Program (YEEP) is a dual-track,environmental education and business-formation program for teens age 15 - 17. In afterschool sessions, teens learn about eco-systems and sustainable gardening with native plants as well as how to create a business.

Then during the summer, along with college student team leaders/mentors, we guide the youth through the operation of a specialty service business where the youth sell and install native plants for residential and business customers.

The youth receive a stipend for the classes and an hourly wage during the
summer.

Both MS4B program areas emphasize hands-on, project-based learning in the great outdoors! And we strive to empower participants to become stewards of the Earth and to take charge of their futures.

What can one person do about climate change?

This Waltham, Massachusetts-based outdoor environmental education program is for students of all ages. With an unique 8-unit curriculum and fun, engaging activities, we educate citizen scientists and stewards of the Earth to try to resolve challenges to the environment and human society. Participants repurpose monocultural turf lawn into meadows--productive, attractive ecosystems gardens with native flowers, shrubs, and grasses—to increase biodiversity, pollinators, and wildlife habitat.
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Waltham Youth Install Native-Plant Pollinator Patches and Meadows

Meadowscaping team just finished a new meadow at Phyllis Norwood's home in Woburn, MA. Phyllis is shown at left.

Please read this!
Doug Tallamy's "Gardening for Life."

Hardy, Drought-Tolerant Native Plants

Native plants were growing in this area before Europeans brought other plants here. Native insects evolved with these plants and can subsist only on those specific indigenous flowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees.

Ornamental and invasive plant s are popular with gardeners but they detract from the biodiversity of an area by replacing local plants, which are essential to building biodiversity in ecosystems. Invasive plants grow rapidly in new areas because the changing climate may benefit them more and local animals can't subsist on them.