The Wild Cypress

About

Our Home Ground

Wildflowers Meadows, our current home field, is one special place where the practice happens, a living laboratory, where The Wild Cypress offers its practice.

You Belong among the Wildflowers.
Tom Petty, “Wildflowers”

The Land

Wildflowers Meadows, our home ground.

Wildflowers Meadows is three and a half acres of forest and meadow in North Central Florida, between Gainesville and St. Augustine, in the Orange Creek and Lochloosa watershed. At its heart stands a Florida cracker farmhouse built around 1900; the land has been farmed and lived on for more than a century. Summer and Mario became its stewards at the end of 2024, and they have been listening to it ever since.

A white rope hammock chair hanging from a long oak limb wrapped in fairy lights, over a leaf-covered clearing ringed by ferns and dense green forest at dusk.

Longleaf pines, pecan, sweetgum, cedar, and tupelo shade the forest paths, and a grand laurel oak watches over the meadow at the center, a clearing made for stargazing. Old lawn is slowly turning back into native grasses and wildflowers. Around the wildlife pond, canna lilies, Bidens alba, and pennywort draw butterflies, dragonflies, and frogs. Red-shouldered hawks hunt overhead, and deer and sandhill cranes pass through. Come back in another season and you will meet a different meadow.

“We seek not to alter the land, but to allow the native landscape to heal, teach, and provide quiet rest for all who enter.”
— Summer Crider and Mario Essig, co-stewards

Before you come

We ask what the land asks of us: arrive gently. Groups stay small, and quiet is honored. Keep to the paths, leave what you find, and let the land set the pace. You don’t need to know anything about nature, or sign language, to belong here. Come as you are.

Land acknowledgment

Wildflowers Meadows rests within the Orange Creek and Lochloosa watershed and the longleaf pine savannas, on lands long stewarded by the Potano (Timucua-speaking peoples) and Seminole ancestors. We also honor Black Seminole histories. This acknowledgment is a commitment to ongoing reciprocity, learning, and care for the land.

Gallery

A few glimpses of Wildflowers Meadows. Tap a photo to see it larger.

  • Grandmother Tree

  • Come sit, let the forest do its magic

  • Enter and you'll be greeted by the Wildflower bus

  • Among the Biden albas, we meet Swallowtail!

A grand Pecan tree stands while a stream of sunlight streams through the forest behind. There is resurrection fern growing on top of branches.
Grandmother Tree1 / 4

Map

Finding your way around the land.

An illustrated map of Wildflowers Meadows: the entrance gate and the drive past the parking area, the farmhouse, the cottage, the Skoolie, the meadow, the fire circle and the bonfire area, two barns, the pole barn and the pond, the forest entrance under the oaks, the bell tent, the bamboo trail and the trail systems.

This map is for orientation only and is not to scale.

Here, Silence sings the song… Nature listens. Will you too?