What are your childhood memories of weather and seasons?
Read the transcript here
Want to hear more? You can listen to the other project collages here
You are here at Herbal Garden of East New York
The Herbal Garden of East New York was founded by Ms. J in 1998. Ms. J additionally started the East New York Farmers Market in 1999 and the East New York Youth Organization. She is a master composter of Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and is the recipient of many awards, including the Mrs. and Mr. Baron Award and the Marty Markowatz, Extraordinary Woman of East New York Award, given by DA Hymes.
Herbal Garden of East New York grows 40 different kinds of medicinal and culinary herbs, including fig trees, juniper and mint.
If you’d like to get involved in the garden or send a donation for operations, please email Ms. J at johanawillins@gmail.com. She also accepts do accepts yarn donation and gift certificates to Michaels.
She teaches master composting, instructions on how to knit and crochet, how to make herbal tea, companion planting, and how to renew, reuse and recycle.
Since 2018, The Warmest Years on Record has collected audio interviews that explore people’s emotional, psychological and sensorial experiences of living in the climate crisis. Through these conversations, we try and answer the question, ‘what does it feel like to live on a rapidly warming planet?’
In the summer and fall of 2021, I partnered with GreenThumb and interviewed almost 60 gardener members at thirteen community gardens across Brooklyn. These folks reflected not only on how climate change has shown up in their emotional psyches, they also shared hyper-local knowledge about how their growing seasons have changed over the past many decades.
Each participating garden hosts a unique sign outside their fence facing the sidewalk. I invite you to visit each garden site, enjoy the green space, and listen in on our other people are wrestling with the big questions of this unique time.
To listen to the full project archive, please visit The Warmest Years on Record here.
If you’re concerned about the climate crisis and don’t know what to do about it, I encourage you to join your local community garden. These spaces are vital for the health and resiliency of our city as we move into an uncertain future. An abundance of green space sucks carbon and other pollutants out of the air, helps with rain water drainage and takes stress off our city sewage systems, cools down the temperature, and most importantly, provides food, nourishment and community in our neighborhoods.
The Warmest Years on Record is supported in partnership with NYC Parks GreenThumb and is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC)
Signs for this project were designed by Ashley Smestad Veléz
Audio mix by Michael Simonelli
Music for audio by Charles Waters
Website designed with Matthew Spencer