Hidden Hills Lots
Pondside Townhomes
Antler Heights Duplexes
Antler Heights Update: Landscaping Has Started
Wilden’s New MTB Trails Open with a 400-Person Summer Block Party
How We’re Building a Sustainable Future – One Seed at a Time
Any real estate development – whether it’s a master-planned community in Kelowna or a small townhome site in Metro Vancouver – needs a well-rounded team to make it happen: a development manager, a site superintendent, a marketing coordinator and a… botanist?
While this may be unusual for other real estate developers, at Wilden ecological conservation is just another day at the office.
Working alongside Tanis Gieselman, ecologist and founder of SeedsCo Community Conservation
Wilden continues to forge on the path less traveled by focusing on the process of “renaturation”, which aims to restore and return natural habitats back to their original state by replanting the native vegetation.
Gieselman, who has been doing this work for over twelve years, has been collecting seeds for Wilden since 2018. Just like seeds though, this work doesn’t happen overnight and has taken time to blossom.
“I grew up walking my dogs through the Okanagan grasslands. The grasses listened silently to my troubles many times, and it was only right that I listened to their worries in return. I could see their future getting dimmer with each new excavation”, shares Gieselman.
In college, she learned just how important and endangered the Okanagan grasslands were, on an international scale.
“I decided to take a deep dive and dedicate my life to understanding, protecting, and expanding Okanagan grasslands”, she adds. “I was inspired to use seed salvaging as one tool to expand conservation into developing areas, and began to work with a number of partners, including Wilden, to start to salvage native seeds before development begins.”
After years of collecting, cataloging and storing, we’re now starting to shift on how and where to grow these seeds. Olive Grove, one of our upcoming collections of semi-detached homes, is the first of several development sites that will see its native vegetation planted back to their original place by the time future homeowners move in.
For Karin Eger-Blenk, Wilden Group’s CEO, renaturation has always been a priority, despite it not being the traditional practice around landscaping for projects.
“We wanted to save the incredible plant diversity that we have in Wilden”, adds Eger-Blenk. “Due to the wetlands that we have, the landscape and vegetation is so diverse and we want to save every bit of it. We don’t want any of these plants to go extinct.”
While the diversity of the grassland ecosystem in Wilden is one to behold, there is one plant that Gieselman enjoys in particular.
“I cannot possibly pick a favourite plant”, Gieselman admits. “However, I really do enjoy Geum triflorum because one common name for them is ‘old man’s whiskers’, so I get to tell people that I have been out in the woods collecting old man’s whiskers all day.”
Whether you’re old or young, or somewhere in between, the vision for the future of Wilden’s vegetation is firmly planted in place for this and future generations to enjoy.
