Art in the Garden: Pocket Posies

About this event

Create a petite and pocket-sided bouquet with a handful of garden blooms for your kitchen table Join is in the garden among the blooms to create your own pocket full of posies–a minerature bouqet to brighten the smallest of corners. Working with a few select blooms from the garden and from NYC’s flower market, we’ll create our own pocket-sized floral arrangements, learning about regenerative flower farming and the power of flowers to convey meaning through symbols and metaphor. 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.