Growing out of a love of working with plants and over ten years of previous professional horticultural experience, A Cultivated Art Inc was established in 2012 as a residential landscape design business with a strong focus on sustainability. In actively searching for sustainable approaches to this work over the subsequent years it became increasingly apparent that horticulture, as currently practi
ced by the majority of the industry, is deeply unsustainable. Horticulture and landscaping extract and transport large quantities of materials from ecosystems and relocates them to urban and suburban spaces where their condition generally degrades until they are removed and replaced with more, newly extracted, materials. These materials include large quantities of high carbon organic material and soils, mostly extracted from peat bogs, wetlands, agricultural systems and forests, quarried rock for paving stones, retaining walls, manufacturing or concrete landscape products and as the gravel base material for under patios, retaining walls and synthetic turf. There is also a heavy reliance on fossil fuels in the transportation of bulk materials, shipping plants long distances, in the manufacture of single use plastic pots and for heating greenhouses to produce already blooming flowers for early spring sales. Lest than 10% of the plants sold in most garden centers are cultivated from species that originate on this continent and the current horticultural industry is one of the primary vectors for the introduction of invasive plant species throughout Canada, with many recognized invasive species still being widely sold and planted. This understanding led to a pause and eventual redirection of the work of A Cultivated Art, specifically centering native plant species and urban re-naturalization projects. Early efforts to design gardens and landscapes with native plants encountered several challenges, including limited information on how most native species behave when placed into urban and suburban settings, nearly non-existent information about which plant species cohabitate well in newly planted spaces and very limited native species availability, with no local growers offering native plants through the full growing season. The first two challenges are being addressed by ongoing experimentation and documentation, which you can find in the Nativ Plant Library. The third challenge led to the development of the A Cultivated Art native plant nursery. Since 2018, A Cultivated Art Inc has been slowly problem-solving various aspects of local native plant production and sales and has worked to develop a sustainable, low barrier to entry, living wage business model for growing and locally offering native plant species. This business model has been developed with the intention of sharing the lessons with anyone interested in starting their own small-scale native plant nursery in any community with sufficient market for native plant seedlings. The native plant nursery has now become the primary activity of A Cultivated Art Inc. In addition to supporting individual homeowners in their habitat creation projects, A Cultivated Art Inc. supplies community and school projects, tiny forest plantings and small to medium sized garden and landscape service providers by offering locally grown native plants through the entire growing season, from May until October, and by supporting groups in selecting species appropriate for their growing conditions. From an equitable access standpoint, the nursery works to make native species financially accessible by offering almost all of the species we grow as young plants, early in the growing season, at $1.50 each so that people with limited financial resources are not excluded from participating in caring for local ecosystems.
