Floating Garden builds upon Swale, taking into account four years of community input. Built on a repurposed industrial barge, it will travel New York’s waterways, inviting people to harvest edible and medicinal plants at stops along the way. These plant species heal, nourish, and root people in seasonal time. 

On water, Floating Garden 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 and survive ecological upheaval on their own terms. Floating Garden will take root in these traditions, using buoyant infrastructure to support solidarity. When we can grow, pick and eat food together, we can connect deeply.

Floating Garden is a sanctuary that imagines the garden as a refusal: a refusal to accept the erasure of public care, a refusal 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 wellness becomes something we practice together, carried by water and shared in time. 

We are so grateful to be able to partner with Creative Time; John Thomas Construction; the Medina Triennial; Perkins & Will; RIT School of Architecture and Amanda Reis; and the Urban Soils Institute. Floating Garden has also received generous support from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Guggenheim Foundation; NYSCA; Rockefeller People and Planet Fund; Dana Bourland; Sue and Matt Evans; Linda Reid; LaVon Kellner and Tom Roush; Mike and Josette Taheri; Deanna Viars; Rik van Hemmen.

Build out of Floating Garden, in progress: