Have you ever walked into a place and felt, without quite knowing why, that you already belonged there? I grew up in Huntington, West Virginia — a university town, a rail town, a place that clawed its way back from being a food desert to building something genuinely alive in its streets and storefronts. Ashland, Virginia, sits about a half hour north of Richmond and carries that same particular energy: a small-town scale, deep local roots, and a food economy built on genuine relationships. Is it any wonder I find myself feeling rooted and at home?

Walking by, I was drawn first to the little pots of yarrow and wild strawberry, but stepping inside, I found a respite in the unhurried atmosphere of Chirp. Founded by Brad and Lorie Lower, this small shop, featuring a painted bird above the door, offers tables and trays of native plants — coneflowers, milkweed, wild columbine, golden Alexanders — each one labeled with quiet pride. The plants themselves are grown by Brad and Lauren Davis, and you can feel that care in every pot.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to belong to a place. Not just to live somewhere, but to be genuinely woven into it. We talk about community in terms of neighbors and schools and local restaurants, but there is another layer of belonging — one that runs through the soil.

Native plants are the original inhabitants of this land. They evolved alongside the insects, birds, and fungi of this specific place, over thousands of years, building relationships so intricate and interdependent that the loss of one quietly undoes the others. A monarch butterfly needs milkweed not just as a preference, but as a biological imperative. A black-eyed Susan feeds a specialist bee that feeds a bird whose song you’ve heard every summer morning without ever knowing what made it possible.

Our national parks, as grand as they are, are too small and too separated from one another to preserve native species to the levels we need. That’s the insight behind Homegrown National Park, a grassroots movement co-founded by University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy. His argument is that conservation needs to happen outside parks and preserves — where we live, work, and play — and that everyone can step up to help, whether with a flowerpot, a lawn, or a garden. 

Tallamy shared his vision for citizen-led conservation in the Land Trust Alliance’s Saving Land magazine. You can read his full piece here.

The idea is both humbling and galvanizing: the most important conservation project in America might be happening, one yard at a time, in places just like Ashland.

You can register your own garden — even a few containers on a porch — on the Homegrown National Park map, and join tens of thousands of others stitching together a living corridor across the country.

What I love about Chirp is that Brad and Lorie have made this feel less like an environmental obligation and more like an invitation. The plants are beautiful. The shop is cheerful. Standing among those trays of native perennials, I thought about what it would look like to invite this landscape back in — to trade a patch of turf for a stand of wild bergamot, to let the golden alexanders do what they’ve always done, to make a little more room for the creatures who were here long before we were, and who need us now, perhaps more than ever, to remember them.

Come find Brad and Lorie at Chirp in Ashland. Bring a tray or two home. Plant something that belongs here. It might just feel, in the best possible way, like coming home.