I had my sights set on doing a piece for Madison Square Park for over a decade. Eleven years ago, when I was a landscape student at New York Botanical Garden, I had an assignment to go to a public park and sketch out the planting beds. I chose Madison Square Park. I was blown away by its horticultural complexity and beauty, and what an incredible service it is to the community to have a park that’s so beautifully designed both for people and for wildlife. That’s very rare in a city like New York.
Madison Square Park has a world-class arts program and a fantastic horticulture program: I had this dream of those two programs talking to each other more. I think that’s what I really embody as an artist; connecting plant life to an arts practice. I approached the executive director, Holly Leicht, in 2022 to discuss cross-pollination (so to speak) between these two incredible resources. One physical installation to bring it all together. We started building the vision for a meditation garden and a children’s garden that would become Gardens of Renewal, which recently opened across the Redbud and Sparrow Lawns.
We worked with the unbelievable horticulture team at Madison Square Park, led by Stephanie Lucas, and reviewed hundreds of pages from the Conservancy’s guide to all the native plants in the city. Soon, we narrowed it down to around 50 plants, with a complex botanical story being told across this whole piece. I wanted to create a project that embodied peace, harmony, and interconnection to remind us that we’re connected to the natural world as part of an ecological community. And, that we’re all part of a human family.
I was drawn to the motif of a spiral as one of our most ancient and enduring symbols. In Buddhism, the spiral is considered the path back to the center, to the true self. It embodies the cyclical journey of life. My hope was to invite people to experience it as a sanctuary, a ritual, and a meditative space. The spiral is planted with thousands of indigenous and native plants, and it follows a narrative arc. As you get further towards the installation’s center, the plants get more rare and more threatened by climate change.
Though its beauty is important, there is also a strong political message running through the work: We are in the midst of climate collapse, dealing with mass extinctions and a government that’s rolling back a lot of our environmental protections. In short, we are facing the greatest existential crisis of our time. I wanted the space to not only be somewhere where people could meditate and reconnect with nature in some way, but also reflect on what we stand to lose.
Today, climate anxiety and a general disconnect to the natural world are prevalent and painful. We live in an advanced stage of capitalism that’s destroying the planet and a crushing political situation—this all divides us. We need to remember that feeling of disconnection is ultimately a con, something we can change. The key to our salvation—of society, the planet, our mental and spiritual wellbeing—is through an understanding that we are part of a bigger ecological story greater than ourselves.
These artworks show how interconnected the systems we live within really are. We have milkweeds, the only plant where monarch butterflies lay their eggs. We have native irises, St. John’s Wort, liatris, bee balm, evening primrose and many other plants that traditional cultures used as vital medicines to treat everything from depression to liver conditions. I hope through these examples that we can ease some anxiety, spark a sense of urgency, and maybe even invigorate stewardship and activism around protecting these vital plants and ecosystems. I feel like there is a different tone to the grief that Gen Z has for the climate. But this Earth Day, we should consider how we can all harness our different skills and talents to cultivate a planet that’s more in harmony and a state of reciprocity. Again, there is a con of disconnection and disempowerment working against us—by “con,” I mean that people have been encouraged to think that climate collapse is too big of a problem to be addressed at all, that it’s all in control of fossil fuel companies and billionaires and anything of a smaller scale doesn’t matter. I think there is also a dangerous myth that social movements only come from a powerful leader. We need to remember that they always come from collective action.
I see this garden - two small lawns in a big city on a big planet—as an act of resistance. Maybe it won’t stop the drilling of a new oil field, but it will protect and nurture your spirit. It will build community. It will provide vital habitat. It will provide space to explore and learn and grieve. We need a radical reimagining of our way of life, and what better place to begin than a garden, which has held our culture’s dreams and aspirations for millennia? This is especially important in a political climate that feels so divided. We conceptualized this piece in 2022 as a resource for COVID recovery. We wanted to reignite a sense of community that could inspire us all to imagine a freer world. But now, the political climate has changed so much and this garden has a different purpose. Safe spaces, play and experimentation are strong messages in the face of authoritarianism. Art, song, dance, ritual, joy—these are all ways to fight the powers that be.
Gardens of Renewal is also a call to action for the defense of our public spaces—there is so much ecological potential in our built environments. We need to include public spaces and parks in the climate conversation to remind us that we live in a more than human world, and that native plants are essential to our ecosystems because they provide vital habitat, food for wildlife like birds, bees, and butterflies—all things that we rely on to survive, and that are deeply threatened. This piece for me is an offering to the earth, a prayer to restore balance to our planet and culture.