Art in the Garden: Evergreen Arrangements

Celebrate the quiet strength of winter by working with evergreens—plants that hold their color, scent, and structure long after the rest of the garden has gone dormant. In this session, we’ll create seasonal arrangements using cuttings sourced from felled trees and from The Hort’s evergreen plantings across the city, giving these branches a second life as objects of beauty and care.

You’ll be introduced to the unique characteristics that make evergreens so special:

🌲Their year-round foliage, adapted to withstand cold, wind, and low light.

🌲Their resin-filled needles, rich with scent and protective chemistry.

🌲Their cultural and ecological roles, from offering winter habitat to symbolizing endurance across generations.

Through making your own arrangement, you'll learn to work with pine, spruce, cedar, juniper, and other conifers by paying attention to their textures, branching patterns, and natural forms.

You’ll leave with a lush winter arrangement shaped by plants that have sheltered birds, anchored city landscapes, and stood green through frost and shortening days!

Your Facilitator: Nicole Smith of A Tribe Called Flowers

Nicole Smith is the founder of A Tribe Called Flowers, a community-centered project rooted in the belief that flowers—and the joy they bring—should be accessible to everyone. What began as a simple hobby of arranging blooms blossomed into a calling: sharing beauty, encouragement, and small moments of brightness with people who need it most.

Nicole describes herself as a flower enthusiast. Through A Tribe Called Flowers, she creates handcrafted bouquets that are donated, free of charge, to local shelters, rehabilitation centers, and communities across the city. Each bouquet becomes a gesture of care, a reminder that someone is thinking of you, and a spark of joy delivered through flowers.

As a nonprofit organization, all donations to ATCF directly fund the making of these bouquets, allowing Nicole to continue spreading beauty and connection one arrangement at a time.

Grounded in the garden, join us to critically and creatively engage in a diversity of artmaking techniques that open us up to deeper dialogue on place, our relationships to our lived environments, ecological concerns, and contemporary culture. Learn meditative and mindful drawing, printmaking and sculptural techniques, scientific observation with plant portraiture, nature-inspired intuitive artmaking and mixed media exploration, and other various practices from botanical and ecologically-focused contemporary artists to create works of art to nurture your relationship to the garden.

Immerse yourself in the learning garden, greenhouse, and across Riverbank State Park's green roof overlooking the Hudson River to create artwork that is rooted in place and in partnership with plants.

Workshops are rain or shine.

When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.

Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.

Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.