Songwood is a specialty cut flower farm on just over seven acres of what was once the Illinois Tallgrass Prairie, one of the most diverse flowering ecosystems on the continent.

Illinois sits inside what's called the "prairie peninsula," an eastward reach of grassland that runs up against deciduous forest to the north, east, and south. A prairie can send its grasses ten feet into the air, but most of its life is underground, in roots, microbes, insects, and the quiet work of burrowing animals. Over thousands of years, that hidden labor built the deep, dark topsoil Illinois and the broader Midwest are known for.

Songwood grows on what was once the Grand Prairie, or black soil prairie, named for its dark, fertile earth. Once that fertility was discovered, the black soil prairie all but vanished in the span of fifty years, plowed under for corn and soybeans. Pristine tallgrass prairie is now the rarest of North America's major biomes; less than one-hundredth of one percent of the true prairie remains in Illinois.

In its prime it was a wildflower garden hundreds of species deep: clovers, sunflowers, coneflowers, daisies, goldenrod, milkweed. And it did all of this without us. The grasses, the wildflowers, the burrowing animals, the microbes in the soil, all of them made each other, over millennia, into one of the most productive flowering ecosystems on the continent.

The flowers we grow now are different: dahlias, zinnias, the descendants of varieties bred far from here. But the act of growing flowers in this soil is older than any of us. We grow without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, or fungicides, and we leave plenty of room for the natives that built this place to begin with.

What we're really tending is a conversation with the land: its fertile past, the grasslanders who cared for it before us, and the living soil we hope to hand forward. And what grows here is meant to be shared, cut by the armful, carried to your table, folded into the magical, ordinary gatherings that bring people together.