Born in the Cold: How a Detroit Winter Gave Rise to Sanctuary of Seeds

Foot print in the snow.

At the start of 2026 I did something that felt a little against my nature, I went north. Way north. I had been invited to teach two glass classes at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and I packed my bags for the frosty winter with equal parts excitement and dread. I am, in every way that matters, a Florida girl.

Detroit is a remarkable city. The art community there is vibrant, generous, and deeply committed to craft, and the College for Creative Studies gave me access to one of the finest glass facilities I have ever worked in. But Detroit in winter is a particular kind of cold, and for someone who measures her wellbeing in proximity to water and open sky, those months of grey were clarifying in ways I didn't expect.

I exist at my best when I am near nature. I am a water baby, I have a hard time going more than a few weeks without swimming, without the smell of salt air, without my hands in something living. In Detroit I found myself indoors almost entirely, the sun gone before I finished teaching, the landscape locked under ice and concrete. It was the first time in years I had been truly separated from the Florida ecosystem that has become the quiet engine of my creative life.

College for Creative Studies Students working on the torch.

College for Creative Studies Glass Lab

And so I started to grieve it. Not dramatically, but in the way you grieve something when you realize for the first time how much you depend on it. I thought about the mangroves. The specific hush of paddling through Weedon Island, the roots forming walls around the kayak, the canopy closing overhead, the water so still it becomes a mirror. I thought about what it means to be cradled by a living system. And I thought about what it means when that system disappears.

Kayaking Weedon Island

In 2024, while I was still in St. Petersburg, Governor DeSantis proposed something that outraged Floridians from every corner of the political spectrum, taking significant portions of our most beloved state parks and repurposing them for pickleball courts, tennis facilities, and golf courses. It was the kind of proposal that reveals what we actually value when we are forced to defend it. And Floridians defended it loudly. From the far right to the far left, the response was unified and furious. A few months later DeSantis backed down. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That moment, that rare, electric moment of total agreement across impossible divides, planted the seed of this project.

Double rainbow at Weedon Island

At the College for Creative Studies I had access to a large, extraordinary facility. I had time, space, and a grief that needed somewhere to go. I decided to think big. I decided to make something that honored the mangrove not as a lost cause but as a living system worth fighting for, a piece that held both the fragility and the hope of that ecosystem in the same breath.

Mangroves at Weedon Island

Sanctuary of Seeds centers on a monumental flameworked glass mangrove tree, built by hand, branch by branch, in that Detroit studio while the snow fell outside. From its branches emerge mirrored glass seed pods that float and disperse through the gallery space above the viewer's head. The mirror is intentional. When you look up at those seeds, at those small, hopeful, floating things, you see your own face reflected back at you. You are placed inside the moment of new growth. You are asked, without words, what you will do to protect it.

Mangroves at Weedon Island

I built this piece in the cold because the cold reminded me what I was fighting for. Sometimes you have to lose something temporarily to understand what it means to protect it permanently.

Sanctuary of Seeds is currently in progress in St. Petersburg, Florida. Follow along as the installation grows.