After being sent to prisons and jails throughout the country, incarcerated people can often become defined by their imprisonment while their personhood fades into the background. Stamped with labels like “inmate” and “criminal,” the nuances of their lives before, and during their incarceration, can become lost.

But at Chesterfield County Jail, a floral therapy workshop run by clinical social worker Becca Amos and floral designer Meredith Wheeler of Secret Flowers has been quietly providing incarcerated people with an opportunity to process their experience through floral design as part of the jail’s Helping Addicts Recover Progressively (H.A.R.P.) program. Now the program’s participants and their floral creations will be featured in a new exhibition at The Branch Museum of Design titled “The Shadow of a Petal: Floral Design Inside the County Jail.” The variety of featured images of floral designs and the individuals who made them should remind viewers these are people who still contribute to society and remain part of the community at large.

Amos began her efforts with HARP, a program that provides therapeutic, medical and educational support to incarcerated people struggling with substance use, by teaching a horticulture and landscaping program. It was a practical course designed to teach skills that could be applied outside of the jail to gain employment. Throughout her curriculum, Amos would sprinkle in lessons that spoke to the creative side of horticulture, and she quickly noticed how much participants were drawn in.

“When I brought up something that was more therapeutic and creative in this vocational program, people always gravitated toward it,” she explains. “I’ve wanted to have something like this design program for a long time; it’s why I took the job in the first place, to build rapport and eventually help create a program like this.”

The seeds of the official floral therapy program were planted when Amos shared images of Wheeler’s work in one of her lessons. One participant loved the designs — a message Amos passed along to Wheeler via Instagram. Wheeler immediately asked how she could get involved.

“I feel like doing this project has helped give new purpose and meaning to Secret Flowers,” Wheeler says. “Floral design can be frivolous; it’s a luxury item. It feels like this is why I should have a business, to be working on a project like this.”

Access to nature

The floral therapy workshops began in 2024, and there have been four to date. While the project is Wheeler’s first foray into carceral space, Amos brings veteran experience.

A self-identified prison abolitionist, Amos attributes her passion for radical change in the prison system to her time volunteering at the Bluestockings Cooperative Bookstore in New York. As her politics developed, she began to wonder how she could combine her interest in prison abolition with the years of experience she had working with plants — growing up in the three-square-mile town of Orange, Va. She spent most of her formative years engaging with nature, from gardening to working at plant nurseries.

Through volunteering on projects from the Horticultural Society of New York’s therapy program at Rikers Island to the New Orleans-based Solitary Gardens program, Amos gained her certificate in horticultural therapy and deepened her understanding of access to nature as a fundamental human need.

“It’s more of a necessity than an option,” she says. “People need nature for their overall wellbeing. The positive impact has been evident throughout my time working with this population. People are able to process things quietly, learn how to work as a team, be vulnerable with each other.”

With separate floral therapy workshops for men, women and attendees ranging from their late teens to 60s, Wheeler saw how guiding people to work creatively with plant materials — with no goal other than touching flowers and exploring the possibilities — gave them a chance to open up.

“We teach reflexing the rose, which means you’re basically peeling the petals back to give the rose a more dramatic shape — it’s really difficult to do; I can barely do it,” Wheeler says, before reflecting on one participant. “I saw this male participant working so delicately to see if he could accomplish this really challenging task, and he was only doing it for himself. The next workshop we had, he came back and started reflexing the rose before I even started talking about it; he was already doing it just to show me he could.”

With approval from both the jail and workshop participants, Amos and Wheeler set out to turn the story of the workshop into an art exhibition. Last year, they held a small show at Secret Flowers featuring prints of participant designs, along with a simultaneous exhibition inside the jail pods so participants could view their own work. No faces or materials directly linking participants to their work were included — something that will change with “The Shadow of a Petal.”

For this new show, Amos and Wheeler brought in photographers Amy Robison and Sydnee Schorr to take professional portraits of participants alongside their arrangements, as well as behind-the-scenes images of the process. The exhibition will also include a constant, rotating projection of participants’ handwritten reflections, collected at the end of the workshop. “The Shadow of a Petal” will also be shown within the jail itself.

Like the works it showcases, the structure of the exhibition is intentionally designed. It begins with an outer wall featuring only floral arrangements, followed by an inner wall that reveals the participants with their creations.

“That’s based directly off of participant feedback,” Wheeler says. “They wanted people to focus on their art first and not see only the jumpsuit.”

Beyond the excitement of a public art exhibition, the chief aim of the floral therapy workshop is to provide participants with a new way of expressing themselves that can be carried with them outside of the jail. The practice continues, alongside other aspects of the HARP program, to act as an accessible tool for maintaining sobriety and helping to prevent a return to incarceration. With that goal in mind, Amos and Wheeler hope the program can be a catalyst for a collective of florists and clinicians to form and replicate the workshop in other carceral institutions.

For now, attendees to the exhibition can support HARP through their donations or purchases — all proceeds will be donated to the program. For the opening night this Friday, attendees will enjoy food and drink from local supporters: Stella’s, Gold Lion Community Cafe, Sub Rosa, Celladora Wines and Garden Party. 

Upon entering, each attendee will be given a flower and a meditation to reflect on as they process any prejudices they might hold, before reading the words:

“Imagine six months without experiencing nature. Six months without a raindrop on your skin or warm sunshine on your face. Six months without running your fingers across a smooth stone or tree bark. Six months without smelling cut grass or campfire smoke, hearing the crunching of leaves under your foot or seeing birds fly overhead. What might that change in you? How would it feel to hold a flower in your hands?”

“The Shadow of a Petal: Floral Design Inside the County Jail” opens at the Branch Museum of Design on Friday, July 11 and will be on view through July 19 . The opening night event takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. on July 11. Admission is free and 100% of proceeds will be donated to the HARP RVA Recovery Program.