Floating Garden builds upon Swale, taking into account four years of community input. If Swale was the temporary prototype, Floating Garden will be a more permanent floating sculpture and sanctuary for people, plants and water. Built on a repurposed industrial boat, it will travel New York’s waterways, carrying an understory of medicinal and edible plants. These plant species heal, nourish, and root people in seasonal time. 

Floating Garden is in response to an ongoing collapse of civic and ecological safety nets. On water, it can circumvent many land-based regulations that prohibit collective gathering, cultivation, and commons. The legal ambiguity of the floating structure becomes a loophole for creating a public space centered on access to plants, water, and wellness. It 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 upheaval on their own terms. Floating Garden will take root in that tradition, using buoyant infrastructure to support solidarity amid displacement and privatization.

Floating Garden imagines the garden as a space of refusal: a refusal to accept the erasure of public care, to normalize ecological grief without acknowledgment, and to yield land-based access to the logic of extraction. Visitors will be 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.