A Meadow is a Neighbourhood
A participatory gardening performance that invites young people to imagine and care for native plant landscapes they have never seen.
Created by Laurel Green & Emily Pearlman
The Department of Meadow Re-Buildification needs you. Through poetic invitations, wild games, and getting your hands dirty, participants explore, imagine, and plant micro-meadows where future generations of pollinators can thrive.
How do you get a child to care for a landscape they have never encountered? How do you make a relationship possible between a young person and a plant, in a meadow that doesn't exist yet, for pollinators not yet born? A Meadow is a Neighbourhood began with these questions. Co-created with Emily Pearlman of Play Where You Live, Yarrow Collective, and a Youth Ensemble of collaborators aged 6 to 14, the project brings together site-responsive performance and native plant advocacy in a participatory installation to ask how creative engagement can cultivate ecological imagination in young people.
The performance is structured as a series of introductions. Participants meet native plants from their region, play custom-designed Wild Games to embody the characteristics of pollinators and plants, listen to an original soundscape imagining what wild bees dream underground, and build perfectly imperfect mini seed ball meadows. Each element asks, what does it mean to care for something you can't yet see?
Commissioned by the Ottawa Children’s Festival, the project acknowledges that it was created and performed on the traditional, unceeded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg peoples, and that the loss of pollinator habitat in this region is a direct result of colonization. Play Where You Live and Yarrow Collective have made a donation to Ginawaydaganuc Village, an Indigenous-led not-for-profit dedicated to creating an eco-sensitive educational and tourist centre rooted in cultural heritage, self-sufficiency, sustainability, and community empowerment.
Native Plant Advocacy in Ontario from both Indigenous and settler-led sources:
Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library
Creative Team
Creators & Producers — Laurel Green & Emily Pearlman
Performer & Design Collaborator — Maryse Fernandes
Installation Design — Will Somers
Bee Dreams Composition & Sound Design — Emily Marie Seguin
Native Plant Illustrations — Sophie Fuldauer
Resident Gardeners — Christina Keyes (Cardinal Glen Ecological Landscaping), Tara Beauchamp (Garden ReLeaf), Eryn Harding (Echo Native Plants)
Youth Collaborators — Orlaith G, Clara G, Llewyn G, Lilly H, Redding M, Oskar R
Special Thanks —Sammie Gough, Micéal Gallagher, Lee Cookson, Polaris School and Centre, Lynn Armstrong, Carol MacLeod, Jane Ellens, Dan Pearlman
Events & Performances
May 3, 2025 —Carleton Place EarthFest, Carleton Place, ON
May 9–13, 2025—Ottawa Children's Festival, Ottawa, ON
May 31, 2025 — Community Planting, Polaris School, Ottawa ON
Support & Partners
Commissioned by Ottawa Children's Festival, and co-produced by Play Where You Live and Yarrow Collective.
Supported by a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.
