the meadow

Who keeps the meadow

Why it exists

The memorial you make for the pet you had at seven is here when you are thirty, remembering them again for the first time. It is here when you are eighty, showing your grandchildren your first friend, and then every friend you had along the way. That is the whole idea. We do it with art, with money put by, and with love.

The person

My name is Jerod Johnson. I live in central Texas, and I build websites for small businesses for a living. I built this one because a memorial should not come with an expiry date. The meadow opened in the late summer of 2026, and the first names in the register are my own pets, planted while I tested the gate.

It started as a project I built alone at a desk. It turned into an art and craft project for my family. My wife and daughter are making the gardens with me now, and the meadow is better for it.

The art, and how it is made

I will be honest about the first season. Willow Run, Janet, the register, and the flowers along the path were painted with the help of AI, because that is what one person at a desk could do to get the gates open. I am keeping them as they are, to remember how this started and to honor the thing that helped it begin.

Every garden after that is being made by hand: painted, built, photographed, and filmed by my family, and as the meadow grows, by other artists. Each garden will have its own style and its own texture, a different piece of work to walk through, while the memorials themselves stay the same in every one. The work is meant to surround them with life, made by someone who cared enough to make it.

Each garden will carry the names of the people who made it and the year they made it, and we are documenting the making of every one, so that what stands here is known to be real. If you are an artist and you would like to make a garden, write to the keeper.

The keeper

Janet, the groundskeeper, is a character: drawn so the meadow would have a face and a voice, and written so that the practical things (what a plot holds, what tending costs, what the meadow will never do) are always said plainly. She is inspired by my mom, who raised me to love animals and to miss them when they were gone. In that way, Janet is a memorial too. The desk behind her is real. A person reads everything left at a plot, answers the email, lights the candles a tended plot is owed, and keeps the promise.

How it is paid for

A place in the meadow is free, and it stays. Families who want the keeper to tend a plot pay ten dollars, once. One tenth of every purchase goes into a preservation fund, kept apart from the money that runs the place and counted in the open, until the fund's own income can keep the gates open; a trust for the meadow itself once there is enough. There are no advertisements, nothing is sold to anyone, and what is planted here is not used to train anything. The office has the plain ledger.

Where it is

The meadow is online, so it is wherever you are. The desk is in Texas. If you need the keeper, write to keeper@meadowkeeper.com; the meadow never writes first, but it always writes back. The meadow also keeps a window on Facebook and Instagram.