How to Hear What Plants Have to Say

Part of What the Folk? Fest from Saturday 13 – Sunday 21 June 2026.

What might plants say, if you knew how to listen?

Beyond the roles we assign to them, plants have long been part of daily life through small rituals and symbolic meanings. In this drawing and journaling workshop, you’ll build a personal dialogue with a plant—entering a one-to-one exchange where its voice, memory, and desires can begin to reveal themselves.

Rather than focusing on accuracy, the session will pay attention to what shifts when you stop seeing plants as objects and begin relating to them as living presences.

This workshop accompanies the publication of Beyond Botanical, a guide to drawing plants in nature by freehand tattoo artist and painter Daniel the Gardener. Tickets include a copy of Beyond Botanical, which you’ll use to complete each exercise in the session.

About Daniel the Gardener

Daniel is an Argentine botanical artist based in London. His creative practice moves between illustration, painting, and tattooing.

Tattooing is a central part of Daniel’s practice and is informed by his background as a painter. Working directly on bodies has shaped the artist’s understanding of how people relate to the plants they choose to carry, and in turn how he looks at and engages with plants myself.

Painting and illustration, by contrast, allow Daniel to explore his own relationship with plants independently. These formats offer a different continuity and material presence. Much of this studio work is guided by site specific locations, sensory recollection, memory, visual documentation, and direct contact with plants.

Alongside his studio-based work, in recent years Daniel has taken part in art residencies at Sarabande Foundation and Xenia Creative Retreat, where sustained guidance and support created the conditions to research, test, and refine the ideas that inform his work.

This time helped situate his practice within specific cultural, historical, and botanical lineages, drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems, animistic worldviews, Western scientific observation, and the legacy of British botanical expansion in shaping botanical illustration.

Born in Latin America and living in Europe for over a decade, that cultural tension continues to shape how he draws and represents plants.

Over time, this led to a series of in-person drawing workshops exploring botanical representation beyond hierarchical, detached observation, and moving toward a more reciprocal engagement in which plant agency is acknowledged, allowing plants to become active participants in the drawing process.

Daniel’s first book, Beyond Botanical, translates the in-person workshops into a self-contained experience in print, offering space for drawing and journaling, and bringing together indoor and outdoor exercises that invite an attentive way of looking, subtly shifting what we consider, what we notice, and what we ultimately bring to the page.