Recipes & Rituals for Community Care: Aromatic Landscapes

About this event

Capture the sensory landscape of your most beloved places Join us at the greenhouse to explore the relationship between scent, nature, and visual composition through the creation of a miniature aromatic landscape. Using a curated selection of fragrant woods, resins, herbs, flowers, roots, and botanical materials, design a unique landscape within a shadow box to recreate a piece of land special to you. Drawing inspiration from natural environments, scent traditions, and botanical artistry, you’ll create your own composition that engages both the eyes and the nose to capture a sense of place. Your Facilitator: Evander (Evandros Amani) Evander (Evandros Amani) is a multidisciplinary artist, herbalist, and scent maker whose work explores the intersection of art and nature – where form, fragrance, and ritual converge. Through his brand Essence Equilibrium, he creates handcrafted perfumes and sensory experiences that honor nature and celebrate the art of balance. Find more of his work at: www.essenceequilibrium.com and on instragram @essenceequilibrium Photo by Nile Scott Studios What does it mean to heal in community? What does it feel like when we extend care to ourselves and the collective? How do plants and our local ecologies care for us? How can we care for the plants and local ecologies in return? Weave in rituals and recipes into your own self-care and community care practices through weekly explorations in herbal arts, somatic movement in the greenhouse and garden, folk remedies, and other wild-crafts and meditative activities that foster a deeper connection to plants to care for the body, mental health, and the people you move with. Each week, be guided by a guest herbalist, healing artist, or wellness practitioner who will help you create your own toolkit and apothecary for self and communal care. Workshops are rain or shine. 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. 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. 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.