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ABOUT
Goldenrod & Co. is a Nova Scotia based practice working on the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, where biodiversity restoration, art, design, and education meet. We work across residential, community, and commercial landscape projects to support habitat, biodiversity, and resilient ecosystems.
Led by women, queer, neurodiverse, and disability identified practitioners, we approach landscape work as an evolving and community informed practice.
We approach this work as a place of curiosity, engagement, and play where cross-disciplinary collaborations can take root and evolve.
Goldenrod & Co. has been many years in the making. Not through a straight line, but through turns, pauses, and returnings. We created this practice to build a workspace that feels safe, inclusive, and grounded, where we can thrive alongside community rather than apart from it. Our work is shaped by listening, collaboration, and shared knowledge rather than hierarchy or ownership.
We collaborate, observe, adapt, and share knowledge openly, treating restoration not as a fixed solution, but as an ongoing relationship between people, land, and more than human life.
EXPERIENCE
We have worked closely with organizations both nationally and internationally, with a strong background in community engagement and large scale collaborative projects.
Across Atlantic Canada, we have managed initiatives ranging from shoreline mitigation and food forest development to lawn to meadow conversions, and other biodiversity focused landscape work. Our interdisciplinary backgrounds in art, design, and environmental studies inform how we work and shape the structure and values of Goldenrod & Co.
Goldenrod & Co. is a platform as much as it is a practice. We share resources for homeowners, gardeners, and land stewards, and make space for accessible and engaging content, from field notes and observations to readings, research, and ideas we have been fortunate to learn from. We do not claim to be experts on all matters. We see ourselves as contributors who listen, research, ask questions, and remain open to being changed by what we learn.
WHY Goldenrod & Co. ?
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We chose the name Goldenrod & Co. because it invites conversation. It unsettles assumptions. It asks people to reconsider what they think they know about plants and landscapes. Understanding those layers is central to our work in biodiversity, ecological gardening, and landscape stewardship. Goldenrod is often blamed for seasonal allergies or dismissed as an invasive weed. In Atlantic Canada, including Nova Scotia, it is native. Its pollen is heavy, insect-pollinated. It does not drift. Ragweed, flowering at the same time, is usually responsible.
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Goldenrod is not invasive here, though it can be invasive elsewhere. Outside its native range, it behaves differently. This distinction matters. In a global, mobile world, ideas of native and invasive are regional, contextual, and always shifting. Goldenrod is assertive. It spreads. It holds ground. It appears where land has been disturbed. This is not a flaw. It is a strategy. It stabilizes soil. It supports insects. Late in the season, when much of the landscape has gone quiet, it remains. Pollinators gather. Biodiversity persists.
The plant is salt tolerant, thriving along roadsides and coastlines where others fail. It reminds us that local ecologies matter that pollinators are local, meadows are specific, and there are no universal solutions.
Goldenrod also appears in Mi’kmaq ethnobotanical records, where its medicinal properties are noted. We acknowledge this knowledge as part of an ongoing relationship with place.
The “& Co.” refers to everything that lives alongside it; flora, fauna, and fungi, the visible and unseen systems that shape an ecosystem. No plant exists alone.
OUR MISSION & VALUES
Our mission is to design, steward, and care for living landscapes in ways that increase biodiversity over time through supporting wildlife, pollinators, soil health, fungi, and the human partners required to sustain them. We work with what already exists, recognizing that fertility does not equal biodiversity, that dominance is part of ecology, and that complexity not tidiness creates resilience.
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We believe restoration is not a fixed outcome but a relationship: between people and land, between species, between past and future. Our work evolves as landscapes evolve.
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Goldenrod & Co.’s goal is not to claim land, solutions, or expertise, but to participate responsibly in the work of restoring biodiversity where we live. We focus on ecosystems and landscapes as shared, living systems, shaped by many forces such as ecological, cultural, political, and historical. We approach restoration as an ongoing, relational practice rather than an act of control.
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We aim to help create conditions where biodiversity can return, persist, and adapt, while remaining accountable to place, people, and the limits of our own knowledge.
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