Art in the Garden: Fall Harvest Totes

Join us in looking into the wisdom of plants that cleanse and connect us to the changing season. In this hands-on making space, we’ll invite the grounding energy of herbs into both our inner and outer ecosystems—learning how to work with plants that purify air, uplift mood, and strengthen our sense of place.

We’ll begin with a short grounding meditation to attune our senses, before moving into creating our tea and incence blends. Together we'll learn and work with allspice, thyme, and mugwort. We'll make space discuss mugwort’s complex history as both a beloved herbal ally and an abundant, sometimes invasive plant. Often dismissed as a weed, mugwort is a resilient plant with deep roots in healing traditions worldwide. It is used to soothe the nerves, invite vivid dreams, and purify the air when burned. In centering mugwort in our incence, we'll invite a nuanced love this plant that knows how to reclaim space.

Participants will then craft their own incense and tea pairings, blending herbs, resins, and essential oils into personalized sets for seasonal refreshment and renewal.

Your Facilitator:Your Facilitator: Odalys Burgoa

O is a Mexican artist from the Bronx with a focus in photography, storytelling and painting. They curate and facilitate workshops in green spaces.

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.