Scott and Colleen Gardner are the heart and soul of The Blue Heron Team.

Collectively they bring over 40 years of informed land management practices and environmental education in the Texas Hill Country. They have a base of knowledge from which to build increasingly competent ways of stewarding land — in the Texas Hill Country and beyond.

We worked with Colleen for over ten years when she was the Executive Director of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve. So when she and Scott were ready to launch their own land stewardship consultancy they invited us to help them develop a visual identity, articulate the BHT brand story, and create their website.

Land stewardship is the conservation of your property’s natural resources and features over a long period of time.

The key to good land stewardship is to ensure that the basic building blocks for healthy ecosystems are taken care of. These basic building blocks are healthy soil, clean water and air, and biological diversity.

Many consider the late Aldo Leopold to be the father of modern conservation theory and practice. Leopold believed that land stewardship was not only rooted in conservation but also involved ethics, or the search for a higher meaning.

He wrote that all ethics rest upon the single premise “...that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively: the land.”

Once we understand that humans are not separate from, but are part of and depend on the natural community, we will develop an ethic to care for the community as a whole.

It has been an honor and a privilege to work with Scott and Colleen and to encourage people to connect more deeply to their land.