FloydFest brings to mind stages blasting music for thousands. But there are other stages, accented with boulders and surrounded by native plants that feed bees, bugs and butterflies.
That’s the way Danielle Ward sees it. Ward, who used to manage a musical stage at the old FloydFest site in Patrick County, took on a new assignment when the event moved in 2023 to its new home, FestivalPark, off U.S. 221 in the Floyd County community of Check.
She’s the grounds manager, with a range of responsibilities that include stormwater management and (goat-aided) poison ivy abatement, along with the color flashes and aromas her hundreds of plants bring to festivalgoers. Many of her set pieces, laden with milkweed, bee balm, wormwood, passion flowers and hibiscus, are strategically placed to control the way rain washes over the hilly site.
Ward and her four-person crew saw a real test on Monday night — two nights before FloydFest 2026 kicks off — when a real gulley-washer came through the site, a rare watery punctuation mark in a summer of drought.
“Everything is looking good!” she said via text on Tuesday.
That’s why FloydFest co-owner and chief executive officer John McBroom hired her to manage landscaping at the new site.
“Danielle is one of the forces of nature at FestivalPark,” McBroom said in a text exchange this week. “She brings her love of flowers and all things plant and brings it up to a new level for FloydFest. Even with the weather conditions that have faced the area over the past year, Danielle has brought true beauty through this generational drought and sets a beautiful table for all to feast upon the ‘Music Magic Mountains.’”
FloydFest 26~Daydream runs Wednesday through Sunday, with headliners My Morning Jacket, Stephen Wilson Jr. and Lukas Nelson. Another scheduled headliner, Tedeschi Trucks Band, announced Monday that it had to cancel, citing singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi’s “appendix scare,” which required surgery. Festival organizers announced on Tuesday that they had booked Greensky Bluegrass to fill in for Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Friday night, main-stage headlining performance.
Capacity is 10,000 at the 210-acre site. Friday and Saturday ticket sales were near capacity as of Tuesday afternoon, festival spokesman Sam Calhoun said.
From sound to ground
Ward, 42, of Roanoke, managed the Speakeasy stage at the old FloydFest site and worked for audio engineering and equipment company Stage Sound. She could handle almost any production aspect and could be seen at multiple festivals and other concerts before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, shutting down the live entertainment business.
“We had to go find other things to do, and I could have sat there and collected unemployment, but sitting is not my thing, for one, and so I was like, well, everybody is just sitting there looking at their yards,” she said over a recent lunch at Floyd Country Store. “I might as well go into landscaping and work outside, where I don’t need to wear a mask around everybody, and still be able to make a living.
“And it was definitely a much-needed thing. Everybody wanted their yards done.”
She already had a good start. Ward’s mom has been a flower wholesaler for 30 years. “She taught me so much about plants and flowers.” Ward got a job with a Roanoke-based landscaping company and gained more valuable experience — how to create borders, how to put down mulch, how to plant trees. Her work included installments for some Roanoke parks.
It all fed into what she called her “production mentality,” getting things done in an organized way.
“Like laying out the plants and making it symmetric, and same with staging, same with lighting, same with audio,” she said. “Like, it’s all a stage, pretty much. You’re setting up for success, whether it be plants, band members or whatever, so I was looking at it all in the same way. I just fell right in.”
McBroom approached her with the idea to “grow some flowers” at the site. She soon figured out there would be significantly more to it than that, and she has learned along the way. The site needed a lot of grass, so she’s spent considerable time growing it there.
She’s learned a lot and executed work on erosion control, including those gorgeous plant beds that keep heavy stormwater runoff from wiping out all the grass she planted.
“Growing flowers isn’t quite all that I do,” she said. “We have to work on just a lot of things on the site to keep it safe, and the water can move so much. And with the droughts that we’ve been in, when things stay dry for so long, and then the water hits, it just floats on the top, and you know you’ve got to go and fix that, and actually learn how to work with the water.”
It’s essential at a site that had to delay its first FloydFest presentation. Organizers canceled the 2023 event in March of that year after determining it couldn’t resolve state permitting issues, including stormwater management, in time. The festival got the permit that August, and debuted the new site in 2024.
Since then, protests from neighbors who opposed the move to Check have abated. None of the “No FloydFest” signs, which used to dot that part of U.S. 221, remain.
“We’re keeping it very safe,” Ward said. “We’ve got the stormwater basins on the site. They’re installed, and everything is doing really good right now. And we’re just staying on top of it.
“As long as you have vegetative cover, then you’re good to go. … I’m the one out on the site yelling at everybody to get off my grass. I’m like the grumpy old grandpa yelling at everybody, ‘Get off my grass!’”
She was sad when FloydFest had to cut down trees that posed potential danger to patrons, she said. But they were converted to mulch, or carved into benches or picture frames for some of the festival’s indoor features, among other uses.
Ward is adding trees, too, including the young willows coming up at the site’s creek banks, wetlands and meadow. More will sprout from cuttings Ward takes from other trees on the site. Protective fences border the water, where cattails, willows, black-eyed Susans, native grasses and others are rising up to solidify the banks.
“Even though we’ve done a lot of stuff to the site, we’re now at the point where we’re trying to give back,” she said.
As FloydFest 26~Daydream promotion began ramping up, McBroom asked Ward to team up with FloydFest marketer Amanda Vance for a series of videos for social media. Vance shoots and edits their Sound & Ground VA videos, in which Ward shows aspects of her job and talks to other folks around the site about topics including yurts and the goats that eat poison ivy.
“Our weedeaters on site,” she says in one of the clips, with Fiddle Tree Farms’ Brad Bowles, the goats’ owner.
She was reluctant to take it on.
“I’m a worker, and I like to get stuff done,” Ward said. “And being that we were 70 days away from FloydFest [when he asked], I was like, ‘John, you really want me to take time from what I need to do on this site to make some fluff and fun stuff for people?’ And he was like, ‘Danielle, I just want you to find the happy and share it.’
“So I was like, OK, I can do that.”
It was easy enough, as there is plenty on the site that makes her happy. She stood smiling during a site tour last week, as she showed off a purple-hued liatris, or blazing star.
“Anything perennial-wise takes about three years, before you see it in its full glory,” Ward said. “It is a pollinator magnet, and it also supports the entire life cycle of the butterfly.”
This is the third year at the site in Check, and much has approached peak since she started working in the dirt and water there.
“This right here,” she said, “all of these pollinators coming to my garden, and seeing this beauty, really brings me joy every single day, here at FestivalPark.”
