MAHTN Newsletter, Vol. 6, #7 2025

Welcome to the

2025 July edition - MAHTNMatters

Our connection with a plant doesn’t begin at the moment we harvest it—it begins the moment we notice it, care for it, and allow it into our lives. Each plant carries a story, rooted in land, culture, and tradition. As we tend to it, we begin to recognize how its needs mirror our own: sunlight, nourishment, rest, and time. This relationship teaches us reciprocity—honoring what the plant gives us while learning how to give back through mindful growing, ethical harvesting, and gratitude. Whether the plant soothes the body, calms the mind, or lifts the spirit, its healing becomes part of our own. Through daily interaction—touching its leaves, observing its cycles, listening to its quiet wisdom—we form a bond that grounds us, heals us, and connects us to something greater. As horticultural therapists, our role is to help facilitate this relationship with nature, to create opportunities for connection, and to play a part in guiding people back to the earth—where growth, resilience, and belonging are always waiting. There is deep comfort in this process, at every stage of life—whether we are just beginning, rebuilding, or simply remembering who we are.

Mikkele Lawless - Editor MAHTNMatters

Cultivate’25 by AmericanHort

North America’s premier annual green-industry event, organized by AmericanHort. Bringing together the full spectrum of horticulture professionals— growers, retailers, marketers, landscapers, interior plantscapers, breeders, educators, suppliers, students and Horticultural Therapists— for an immersive four-day experience.

Click here to find out more!

The Potting Shed

Available to all MAHTN members providing a comprehensive repository of information and ideas to support HT's.

Inside the Potting Shed you will find: 

• On-demand access to HT webinars and videos
  
• Networking opportunities
• Access to specialized Communities of Practice
• Marketing Tool Box
• Employment Opportunities                                                              

If you have an employment opportunities to share please email: info@mahtn.org

Check back each month to see updates and new materials added!

“Some of the trees have scars on them”

How horticultural therapy helps torture survivors to rebuild their lives.

Read all about it here!

Read more about Heroic Gardens and its new project to help support local veterans through the Pennypack Sunflower Farm at WHYY.

Vacant Lot in Holmesburg To Be Transformed Into Sunflower Farm

Transform the Dreaded Weeding Chore Into a Therapeutic Experience

An interview with:

Becca Amos 

Floral Therapy Exhibition

The Shadow of a Petal:

Floral Design Inside the County Jail

We asked Becca:

1. What are your program goals?

For the program: Judith Butler, philosopher and scholar, asks “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” Who and what, under our current system of punishment, is worthy of grief? Butler explores the concept of mourning as a sort of connective tissue that could inspire solidarity. We wanted to explore what it would look like if there were intentional spaces for the work of acknowledging loss experienced by those inside and the inevitable change that stems from it.

For the exhibition: It is our hope that exposing audiences to the benefits of Floral Therapy will ignite larger conversations about the role that nature plays in all of our lives, the systems in place that deny incarcerated people access to it, and the importance of reimagining and redesign in the discourse about the role of nature in healing and community building. --

2. What population do you work with?

Incarcerated individuals at the HARP (Helping Addicts Recover Progressively) program at Chesterfield County Jail

3.Why did you choose to develop this program / How did you get into this population?

I worked for 4 years at HSNY’s Rikers Island horticultural therapy programs full time, primarily with 16-21 yr old youth and young adult males. I worked with some extremely inspiring people, both coworkers and participants, and fell in love with the practice. Since then, I have also worked with Solitary Gardens in New Orleans, an absolutely flooring therapeutic garden and public art program for individuals incarcerated in solitary confinement. And other therapeutic garden projects. This work only made me want to deepen the scope and depth of my practice so I went to get my masters in social work. I’m now a psychotherapist in addition to a certified horticultural therapist (and florist myself). One day in my horticulture classroom (I used to teach a vocational program for many years at CCJ), a student became enamored with the work of Richmond floral designer Meredith Wheeler of Secret Flowers through photographs. I reached out to her to let her know about his appreciation and she was interested in collaborating! My dream project was to create an abolitionist floral collective. This was the jumping off point for our program. In January 2024, we introduced Floral Therapy as one of many tools, therapies, and resources for harm reduction offered to participants of HARP (Helping Addicts Recover Progressively) inside Chesterfield County Jail. The team has since grown to include photographers Amy Robison and Sydnee Schorr and Haywood Watkins III, an Executive Creative Director in advertising. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world. In Virginia alone, incarceration rates top almost every NATO country, with approximately 13,000 individuals reentering society post incarceration annually. Furthermore, out of 50 states, only 10 have minimum requirements for outdoor access. In non-prison correctional facilities, including jails, these minimum requirements are rarely met for a variety of reasons. Many of these ‘outdoor spaces’ are enclosed blacktop or concrete slabs, void of flowers, trees, grass, and rainfall. This is not enough. ○ Carceral spaces are designed to hide the psychic pain experienced by those who are incarcerated from the public eye. Subsequently, the healing, growth, and beauty that is nurtured against incredible odds among those inside is also locked away. This ability to shield ourselves from or refuse to bear witness to the struggles AND successes of incarcerated people allows us to maintain stigmatic stories about them. It gives us permission to think in black and white, good and bad, without nuance and without empathy. This is not a design flaw, but the foundation that upholds carceral institutions. 

4. What is innovative about your program? 

I am not aware of any other therapeutic programs in jails or prisons that exclusively use flowers as a tool for healing. If you do, please let me know because I would love to connect! Floral Therapy is a prefigurative program and space, one that strives to embody the values of all who are involved and shapeshifts in its design as feedback is voiced by participants and implemented by the team. It is in the immersion in flowers, this piece of nature that is typically inaccessible, that our program inherently becomes a space to engage with that which has been taken away, lost, or missing. It becomes a space for processing disenfranchised grief, losses that are not deemed worthy of mourning by broader society and therefore not publicly grieved. We created a program that puts it all on the table, makes eye contact with it, touches it, meditates on it, and shares stories about it. 

5. What kinds of activities do you do?

Our approach uses guided, floral-based interventions to support the psychosocial wellbeing of incarcerated individuals. Over the past year, we’ve facilitated a series of workshops with both the men’s and women’s groups inside the jail. A type of meditation called “mindful savoring” from Eric Garland’s Mindfulness Oriented Recovery Enhancement, a modality used with HARP, in which we invite participants to select a flower, fruit, or vegetable that speaks to them, sit with it, and meditate on it using all of the senses throughout a guided meditation. Floral Design! Each participant makes their own arrangement, titles it, and presents it to the group. Portraits were taken of each participant throughout the process and these are going to be shown in our upcoming exhibition.

6. How is your program evaluated?

Feedback forms are provided to participants so we get direct feedback about how to adjust programming moving forward to the next session. Within HARP, if participants don’t sign up or there’s little interest, it doesn’t happen! Our rooms stay full :)

7. How can I get more information about your program?  www.beccaamos.com; Meredith’s business: Secret Flowers in Richmond Virginia ● Photographers: Amy Robison and Sydnee Schorr ● HARP RVA 

8. Anything else you'd like to mention?

Come see our exhibition! We’re so excited to share a project that is most special to our hearts, and something that has been in the works for over a year! Please join us for the opening night of The Shadow of a Petal: Floral Design Inside the County Jail on July 11th from 6-9pm at the branch museum of design. We are hosting a week-long exhibition at the Branch Museum, running from July 11th-19th. Swipe through the post for more info about the floral therapy workshops and the exhibition. 100% of proceeds from this exhibition will be donated to the H.A.R.P. RVA recovery program. You can also donate directly to the program venmo: @harprva

Parking is available in the church lot next door, and guests are encouraged to enter through the back garden entrance.