Jane Whitaker Mead’s family ranch and surrounding environs in the Atlas Peak area far above the Napa Valley seeped into her nationally recognized poems.
She wrote of the vineyard “where my father tempts life from dirt to wine in a habit of seasons stronger than love.” She wrote of “the rocky draw, the waterfall” off Atlas Peak Road.
Mead died in 2019 at age 61. Her estate recently donated the 1,318-acre ranch — two square miles — to the Land Trust of Napa County.
“She made this gift,” Land Trust CEO Doug Parker said. “She wanted to protect the land forever.”
Mead left her position as poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in 2003 to oversee management of the ranch after her father’s death. Her obituary said that “much of Mead’s poetry was informed by her devotion to the land.”
Here on the ranch grows Mead’s owl’s-clover, known to be found only in this immediate area. Consulting botanist Jake Ruygt discovered the yellow flower and in 2012 named it after the Mead family.
Here grow other rare plant species, including the few-flowered navarretia, Napa bluecurls and holly-leaved ceanothus. Here are birds ranging from the ash-throated flycatcher to the wrentit.
Mike Palladini and Kimberly Howard of the Land Trust recently joined Ruygt on a visit to the Mead Ranch. They hiked out to the vernal pools, in an area with volcanic rock that fills with a few inches of water during rains.
Sopped soils teemed with tiny juvenile tree frogs. Tadpoles swam in a vernal pool. Yellow and white flowers by the thousands peaked up above the green grasses.
“To have a protected a wetland of this magnitude with the level of rare plant values we have here ... is just a wonderful part of this conservation project,” Palladini said. Then the three walked to vineyards where a tractor drove. The Land Trust is typically more involved with preserving habitat than farming. But Howard said the vineyards will remain for the immediate future, as there is a long-term lease for their use.
“This is new for us and outside the norm for us,” she said.
Palladini, Howard and Ruygt walked to the remains of the Mead homes, which were destroyed in the 2017 Atlas Fire that started nearby. Stone walls remain.
Ruygt recalled first visiting the property in 1990. He built a relationship with the Mead family and has been there many times over the years looking at plants.
Parker said Mead Ranch fits in with efforts to create a wildlife corridor in the eastern mountains framing Napa Valley, from Robert Louis Stevenson State Park near Calistoga southeast to American Canyon.
Mead Ranch will become part of the Land Trust’s system of preserves. It could have some public access, Parker said.
“I talked to Jane before she passed away,” Parker said. “She wanted to have some education programs out there.”
The Mead family bought the ranch in 1913. Mead’s father Giles grew up there and later started the family’s relationship with the Land Trust.
Giles Mead’s career included being a Harvard professor of ichthyology and director of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. In interviews, he recalled he had desired to return to the family’s Napa ranch, which he ultimately did.
“This place has been my life and love for over a half-century and my children share these sentiments,” Giles Mead wrote to his Atlas Peak neighbors in 1989.
He gave a conservation easement on the property to the Land Trust that year. The family retained ownership, but gave up development rights to ensure the property never became a patchwork of ranchettes.
“The potential use of this property no longer rests on the whim of politicians or subsequent property owners,” Giles Mead said in a Feb. 1, 1990 article in The Napa Register.
By forgoing development rights, “I think we’ve gained the ranch in a more permanent way,” Jane Mead added at the time.
Giles Mead donated $1 million to the Land Trust in 1999. A charitable foundation named after his parents provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to the Land Trust. When Giles Mead died in 2003, the Land Trust’s executive director at the time, John Hoffnagle, called him “the Land Trust’s premiere patron.”
As Parker noted, with the gift of the Mead Ranch to become a Land Trust preserve, Jane Mead is part of that pantheon. Her legacy will be both the preserved land and her words that live on in poems such as this one.
“Whenever the experiment on and of my life begins to draw to a close I’ll go back to the place that held me and be held. It’s O.K. I think I did what I could. I think I sang some, I think I held my hand out.”
