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Cris Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, with her arrangements of flowers picked by ClarkLindsey residents that she dried and mounted in shadowboxes created by residents in the woodshop at the facility in Urbana.
URBANA — It’s not often that you find spring flowers like daffodils and peonies blooming alongside mid-summer beauties such as thistle, indigo and bergamot, but residents of ClarkLindsey will get to see just that today.
That is when a long-term collaborative art project between the residents and staff and botanical collage artist Cris Hughes will be unveiled for all to see.
For a year and a half, ClarkLindsey residents and staff have contributed their time and talent to this unique project that will soon be permanently displayed at the retirement community.
Some gathered flowers and other natural items from the grounds. Others grew and tended those flowers. Still others used their woodworking talents to build the shadowboxes where they will be displayed.
The result is two vibrant works of three-dimensional art composed entirely of foraged finds from nature.
A closer look at one of the arrangements created by Cris Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, of flowers picked by ClarkLindsey residents that she dried and mounted in shadowboxes created by residents in the woodshop.
The project, facilitated by Randy Hauser, ClarkLindsey’s landscape designer and horticulturist, and Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, is a labor of love and an homage to the beautiful gardens tended by residents and staff alike.
The completed works of art contain dozens of varieties of flowers and other flora, and even a few insects, forever preserved in all their seasonal brilliance. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were freshly cut rather than part of a permanent display. Even the frames are made from the wood of a sugar maple tree that once stood on ClarkLindsey property.
The rainbow of flowers collected by ClarkLindsey residents and dried and arranged by Cris Hughes.
The “seeds” of this project, so to speak, were planted in 2023 by a member of ClarkLindsey’s leadership team who knew of Hughes and her business, Hauser said.
“She’s the one that thought it’d be neat if we had one of these for the grand opening” of the facility’s new independent-living apartments, he said.
They contacted Hughes, who enthusiastically signed on to the project, and planning began in earnest.
The process
Throughout the next year and a half, Hauser scheduled a dozen foraging days where he invited residents and staff to wander the grounds and gather items. The process took so long, Hughes and Hauser said, because they wanted items from all four seasons.
The rainbow of flowers collected by ClarkLindsey residents and dried and arranged by Cris Hughes.
“It wasn’t just blooms; it was textures, pieces of bark, prairie seed heads,” Hauser said.
And there was no shortage of choices, thanks to the many gardens and prairiescapes scattered throughout the grounds.
In addition to the many flower beds tended by ClarkLindsey staff, there are also garden plots managed and nurtured by residents. Nothing was off-limits, Hauser said, as long as people adhered to the unwritten rule of foraging, which is to be a good steward of the plants. If done well, you often can’t tell that anything has been cut.
On foraging days, “if anything caught anyone’s eye, we would snip it and put it in a vase, knowing that not everything would be a dryable thing,” Hauser said. “We wouldn’t limit it to just flowers; we would go after leaves,” and things like moss to use as filler.
Randy Hauser, landscape designer and horticulturalist at ClarkLindsey in Urbana, holds a box of flowers picked by residents that became part of Hughes’ art pieces.
Occasionally, Hauser and Hughes would go out on days that didn’t coincide with scheduled outings in order to capture something at peak bloom, but it was the staff and resident input that was most important.
“Residents would often notice stuff that we didn’t,” Hauser noted.
Gathered items were immediately put into vases of water, and Hughes would whisk them back to her studio to begin the preservation process.
Preservation is labor-intensive, taking hours of painstaking work by Hughes, and needs to begin soon after the flowers are picked. She touches every item that goes into a piece, pruning and shaping them before carefully covering them in silica to dry. What makes Hughes’ process different from other types of flower drying is that it more closely preserves the color and shape of many flowers for the long-term.
Once dry, Hughes stored the flowers in clear plastic bins until she was ready to begin arranging them. When the collection and drying process was finally complete, she had a rainbow of flowers from which to choose.
Collective memory
This project isn’t Hughes’ first collaborative work, but the heartfelt connections she made with the residents were evident. She not only loved their contributions, but also the meaning behind the items they foraged.
“Over the year, we have had the opportunity to collect and preserve flowers planted by residents who are no longer on this earth, but their legacy blooms year after year,” she wrote in a poignant Instagram post about the project.
The flowers in this unique work of art not only represent the natural beauty of the grounds at ClarkLindsey but also the collective memory of the people who live there. Even before the project began, Hauser conducted regular garden walks for residents, and he, like Hughes, clearly gets as much if not more out of these outings as the residents.
Nearly all the residents have a positive association with gardening and flowers, he said, and being outside and seeing or smelling a flower often opens the floodgates of memory.
ABOVE: From left, ClarkLindsey resident Ray Norton; Randy Hauser, the facility’s landscape designer and horticulturalist; and Cris Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, with some of the flowers picked by residents that Hughes dried and mounted into two art pieces to be displayed at the facility in Urbana. BELOW: Norton, right, and fellow resident Anton Chaplin work on one of the two shadowboxes in which Hughes mounted the dried flowers.
“It’s usually a one-way ticket, a fast ticket, to a good thing when they were younger,” he said.
Picking flowers for the project was just an added benefit of these outings.
“The big bonus was literally (that) the stuff they chose is going to be in something that’s basically forever, the way (Hughes) preserves it,” he said.
Framing it up
In addition to the flowers that were grown and chosen by residents and staff, the frames are also a product of two ClarkLindsey residents, Anton Chaplin and Ray Norton. Chaplin and Norton agreed to make the shadowboxes based on their skill in ClarkLindsey’s woodworking shop.
Even before this project was conceived, Chaplin and Norton helped Hauser around the grounds. Norton, a Master Naturalist, has helped Hauser to identify and remove invasive species. Norton also participated in one of the early spring foraging events. The search for flowers was “like a little bee looking for honey,” he said, zipping around, gathering a few flowers here and there.
ClarkLindsey resident Anton Chaplin works at a drafting board on plans for shadowboxes that will hold flowers picked by residents and dried and arranged by Cris Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, to be displayed at the facility in Urbana.
Chaplin, who has been doing woodworking and wood turning as a hobby for years, was an obvious choice to take the lead on making the shadowboxes. His involvement began before the botanical art was even being considered. When Hauser knew trees would have to be removed to make way for the new construction, he enlisted Chaplin to help him choose which ones to have milled for use in their woodworking shop. Two years later, the lumber was ready for Chaplin and Norton to build the frames.
Together, they worked alongside Hughes to decide on the size of the frames, as well as how they would be constructed and finished to best preserve the art for the long-term. Now, it is ready for its debut.
Residents will get a first look at the two pieces of art during a happy-hour event at 4 p.m. today in ClarkLindsey’s Bistro. While casual observers may not realize how many people had a hand in bringing this project to fruition, it is the communal aspect of this artwork that makes it special.
ClarkLindsey residents Anton Chaplin, left, and Ray Norton work on one of the shadowboxes that will hold flowers picked by residents and dried and arranged by Cris Hughes, owner of Secret Gardens CU, to be displayed at the facility in Urbana.
It is apropos that the two pieces will eventually be displayed in the “Connections” area of the new north complex; they are a physical testament to the joy that comes from our connection to nature and each other, and a permanent representation of the heart and soul of those who live there.
