Watershed Health is the tending of a place defined by the shape of land and the common course of water, not by colonial border lines and capitalist real estate boundaries. All the water, from runoff to groundwater, flows in the same direction. A watershed draws all life together through creeks, rivers, aquifers, streams, springs running into the circle and cycle of water, local and global at the same time.

Watersheds nest like Russian dolls, a never-ending pattern scaling up and scaling deep: a roof gutter draining into a seasonal creek within the Shenandoah River within the Chesapeake Bay. Watersheds look like bowls holding the blue abundance, even when most of that blue is underground, basins of relations because everything in them depends on the water cycle and everyone lives in a basin somewhere. Our watershed, like many others, has been scarred by a whole lot of trauma, harm, and oppression, but we see signs and feel the currents of resilience, healing, and liberation and we want to the join the side of those forces, knowing the health of this place flows into the health of all other places through the flow of water.

We harvest that flow by slowing, spreading, sinking, and sharing water in cisterns and tanks, in the soil and the bodies of plants, roots tapped into the groundwater and leaves breathing out moisture. That’s partly why we call ourselves a riparian nursery. Riparian buffers are strips of water-tolerant plants on the banks of streams, rivers, and ponds, dynamic and diverse ecosystems whose reforestation could look like orchards, woodlots, and seed sanctuaries. Our riparian nursery grows alongside waterways, but we also grow to nurture and nourish the watershed. Riparian comes from a Latin word for bank, the kind of bank that stores more vital versions of wealth, nets of roots to hold the soil and pulses of energy and nutrients to redistribute. A riparian nursery is a bank to propagate power to give away.

We imagine the world’s places united by the global flow of water rather than the global flow of capital that turns rivers into walls rather than living circulation systems. Water is life, and watersheds make up the flow of a bioregion, a living place.