The Garden Charter

How We Tend This Garden

Olive & Edith was created as a quiet, welcoming place for people who notice what others walk past.

The garden holds many kinds of life and many ways of seeing. Some visitors arrive with years of knowledge.

Others arrive with one photograph, one question, or a new desire to pay attention.

Everyone is welcome to begin where they are.

Curiosity Before Certainty

We welcome questions, wonder, careful disagreement, and the freedom to learn in public.

We celebrate learning more than being right. An identification may change when new evidence appears. A mystery may remain open. Different climates, regions, gardens, bodies, cultures, and experiences may lead people to notice different things.

Certainty is never a reason to become unkind.

Kindness Before Correctness

Every sincere question deserves care.

Correction should offer understanding rather than humiliation. We do not mock beginners, shame people for not knowing a name, or use expertise to make another visitor feel small.

Cruelty never helps anything grow.

The Whole Story of Nature Is Welcome

The garden includes beauty, birth, shelter, abundance, competition, predation, damage, loss, death, and change.

We do not sensationalize suffering, but neither do we erase nature’s difficult truths. When a page contains material that may be upsetting - predation, injury, death, reproduction, or another natural life event - a gentle Garden Path Marker may help visitors choose whether and when to continue.

Understanding does not require the garden to become less wild.

Respect for Living Neighbors

Wildlife is observed with patience and appropriate distance. We do not encourage handling, disturbing nests, removing creatures for entertainment, feeding wildlife in harmful ways, disclosing sensitive locations, or interfering simply to create content.

Plants and specimens are gathered carefully. Whenever possible, Herbarium materials are fallen, faded, naturally shed, abundant, or removed during ordinary tending. The life of the garden comes first.

The Garden Tenderers avoid pesticides harmful to nature, wildlife, or pets and seek to create conditions where life feels welcome rather than controlled.

A Family-Welcoming Garden

Olive & Edith is intended to be gentle enough for families to explore together while remaining honest about the natural world.

Parents and caregivers remain responsible for deciding what is appropriate for the children in their care. Children should not share their full names, locations, schools, contact information, photographs, or other identifying details in public areas of the website.

Any interactive feature involving children will receive additional safety review before it is opened.

Privacy and Personal Safety

Do not publish another person’s private information, precise location, contact details, medical information, personal photographs, or private correspondence without permission.

Do not request private contact with minors. Do not use the garden to pursue, manipulate, intimidate, exploit, or harass another visitor.

Protecting guests matters more than preserving any comment, account, or conversation.

Community Conduct

If comments or community spaces are offered, we welcome:

Thoughtful questions and observations
Kind identification help
Regional and seasonal knowledge
Respectful differences of experience
Encouragement of beginners
Stories that deepen understanding and connection

We may remove content that includes cruelty, harassment, threats, hate, discrimination, sexual exploitation, dangerous instructions, invasive personal information, spam, deceptive promotion, repeated disruption, wildlife harm, plagiarism, or infringement.

When possible, mistakes may be met with clarification. When safety or trust is threatened, removal may be immediate.

If something harms the garden, we gently remove it.

Creative Stewardship

The stories, photographs, artwork, patterns, journal pages, characters, designs, films, and collections within Olive & Edith represent years of observing, recording, and making.

Visitors are welcome to learn from them, link to them, and share approved material with proper credit. They are not welcome to copy, reproduce, sell, alter, scrape, remove attribution from, train AI systems on, or present the work as their own.

Stewardship is not about closing the gate to generosity. It is about making sure generosity does not become extraction.