The Discovery Garden at Wolfe’s Neck Center is an experiential education field laboratory located along a central spine linking the facilities that support WNC’s educational programming. The forms and materials of the Discovery Garden, developed using the regenerative farming techniques practiced in the surrounding working landscape, give form to intimate and accessible spaces while providing the content for education programming.

Regenerative agriculture is focused on farming practices that increase soil health and facilitate soil carbon sequestration. The Discovery Garden highlights the ecological processes that are critical to healthy ecosystem function. The cyclical nature of these processes – decay and regrowth, plant community succession, seasonal harvests – requires a design approach that embraces ecological change and transformation and brings traditional ideas of how designed landscapes exist through time into question.