Floating Garden is a shared space for people, plants and water. It contains medicinal gardens, biochar water filters, and tidal time sculptures. Built on a repurposed industrial boat, it travels New York’s waterways, carrying an understory of medicinal and edible plants. These plant species are intended to heal, nourish, and root people in seasonal time. 

Floating Garden responds to the ongoing collapse of civic and ecological safety nets. On the water, it circumvents many land-based regulations that prohibit collective gathering, cultivation, and plant-based care. The legal ambiguity of the floating structure becomes part of the work: a loophole for creating a public space centered on access to plants, water, and healing.

This project draws from a global tradition of floating gardens as tools of resilience and resistance. From the chinampas of Mexico to the wetland farms of Bangladesh and Kashmir, floating gardens have allowed communities to maintain food sovereignty, resist land privatization, and survive ecological upheavals on their own terms. Floating Garden takes root in those traditions, using buoyant infrastructure to support solidarity amid displacement and privatization.

Floating Garden imagines gardens as a space of refusal: the refusal to accept the erasure of public care, to normalize ecological grief without acknowledgment, and to permit land-based access to the logic of extraction. Visitors are invited to slow down, to listen, and to inhabit a space where healing is shared, time is ecological, and sanctuary becomes something we practice together, carried by water and shared in time.