Our Roots

In 2023, just after finishing college, Ayla Bella founded Rooting Resilience. Her goal was to create Columbus’ first food forest on public land. She had seen projects like these thriving across the country, and wanted to bring that vision to her hometown.

The vision was to push the boundaries of what a garden could be. Could it grow food while healing the ecosystem? Could it build community and deepen our connection to land? Could it protect neighborhoods from climate change, and could the food belong to all of us?

But the process revealed deeper truths.

We faced land-use restrictions and layers of red tape. It became clear that the barriers weren’t just logistical, they were systemic. Instead of letting those roadblocks stop the work, we wanted to let them reshape it.

Rooting Resilience is growing from a single project into a platform. A place to share the vision of Resilience Gardening, to teach, to connect, and to plant seeds of change in ways that are irresistibly inviting.

Today, Rooting Resilience is about more than one site. It is about building ecological, social, resource, political, and emotional resilience across gardens, neighborhoods, and communities. It is about making resilience so vibrant, so accessible, and so joyful that anyone who encounters it can’t help but carry it forward.

This is our story so far, and it’s still being written. Come write with us.