Retreats & Off-Sites

Most retreats are forgotten by Wednesday. Here's how to plan one that isn't.

Most venues are neutral. The Undergrowth was built to be something more — a private woodland retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the environment itself does the work. Here's why that difference matters.

On conditions, connection, and what wild mushrooms know about belonging. Oyster mushrooms growing on tree stump at The Undergrowth. There's a cluster of wild mushrooms growing just off the main path at The Undergrowth. They weren't planted. Nobody tended them. They showed up because the conditions were right — the moisture, the shade, the particular relationship between root systems that scientists are still working to fully understand. We think about that a lot when someone

Some places exist to slow you down. This is one of them. There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It is the tiredness that comes from being always-on, always-connected, always responding to something that happened on a screen somewhere. It is the tiredness of meetings that could have been emails, of conversations that happen over text instead of over a table, of weekends that end before they ever really started. We know that tired. It is exactl