Gather
The Church Of Flowers is a public garden for non-denominational self-directed spiritual practice, community gatherings, occasions for ritual, and home to a green cemetery.
The main garden hosts public and private gatherings of contemplation, celebration, and community.
A series of smaller public gardens and walking trails provide a place for smaller, quiet contemplation.
With vivacious designs, eclectic plant choices, and climate resilient maintenance practices, these spaces offer a rich biodiversity for the world and the soul within the meadows and woodland paths, which vary in length and accessibility to accommodate different abilities.
Gravesites in the green cemetery each host a raised garden bed, growing a mix of food, medicinal, material, and spiritual plants, for the family of the beloved and the community to partake in and enjoy.
The on-site plant nursery provides plant starts, design and maintenance for the gardens at The Church and through sales to the public for their own gardens.
Our hope in building this space is that it will serve a larger cultural shift in how we live in community through the transformational moments of our lives.
This space will expand our conceptions of support and abundance, expand our definitions of faith and belief, and open a conversation about how the wake of a loss can sustain and nourish a community.
We are part of a larger movement of faith and municipal land management (specifically in regards to church owned properties and graveyards) and how these ‘faithlands’ can be used to feed and heal local inhabitants, including, but not limited to, humans around the world. While we are seeking land in central Vermont for this particular site, we hope to be an experimental model for more projects like this to flourish.
We are interested in systems outside of capitalism, beyond politics, a return to a culture of kindness, interactions that center mutual compassion and a culture wherein we normalized truly mutually aiding each other.
We support pollinator habitat, animal corridors, healthy food and medicine for everyone across financial barriers grown with holistic approaches to planetary care, and a return to a more ecological way of tending to our dead.
In our programming we aim to cultivate a sense of community that serves the diversity of thought and experience that our region holds, and in particular offer acute aid, connection, and healing to families with small children, youth, people emerging from incarceration, veterans, and elders.
Above all we are interested in beauty, joy, and a sense of thriving for all.
