When Robin Motzer moved into her farmhouse recently, she heard coywolves howling ten feet from the porch that first evening. She and her partner Sean had just taken over land his family had mostly sold off before them, and they are in the process of rewilding what’s left—letting a field go back to meadow, planting native vegetation instead of ornamentals. The coyotes showing up felt less like an intrusion and more like a welcome.
Robin runs Wildlands and travels the country through her Regeneration Nation campaign, working with communities from a Sonoran Desert habitat restoration group in Tucson to a neighborhood garden that now feeds sixteen families off a small plot. On this episode of Talking Dirt, we discussed what sanctuary looks like for someone without ecological training and without much land—a quarter acre, a couple acres, an edge you’ve been mowing out of habit.
Her answer: start with the parts of your property doing the least for you. Headlands, corners, riparian buffers, the strip along a fence line. Observe before you plant—that part’s non-negotiable. What goes where after that depends on what the ground is already doing, and she walks through it strip by strip in the full conversation above.
We also got into the firefly piece I read recently—a story about an urban park where fireflies only survived because the maintenance crew refused to mow one wet corner. Neglect did the habitat work nobody had budgeted for and it could work for you, too.
➡️Worth reading alongside this one: Robin’s most recent Wildlands article on building sanctuary at home, and the firefly piece I referenced during the call: Summer’s Sparks.
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video with Robin Motzer! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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