Explore nature in the city with artist Jessica Dalrymple

Since the pandemic, eco-artist Jessica Dalrymple has been leading free Mindful Nature Journaling Hikes in parks around the city. The walks started when she and a friend who is a meditation teacher took a group out in Prospect Park to write and draw in nature, cultivating a space for connection and reflection at that difficult time.

Now Dalrymple offers two-hour journaling hikes in each of the five boroughs during the summer and fall months. Remaining walks this year will take place at Brooklyn Bridge Park and Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn, Forest Park in Queens, Pugsley Creek Park in the Bronx and Riverside Park in Manhattan. See below for more details.

For Dalrymple, the hikes are a form of social practice art — art that is based in interactions and shared experience. After walking for half an hour, participants sit down for a short guided meditation, then turn to their journals, following their own impulses or optional prompts such as tracing leaves or shadows, or writing haiku.

“When you quiet down like that, you start to see things you didn’t see before,” Dalrymple says. “It’s kind of magical. Birds will come and sit right at your foot, because you’re in the zone. You’re on nature’s wavelength.”

This intimacy with nature guides all of Dalrymple’s artwork. I talked with her in her Windsor Terrace back garden, where she is growing native perennials to use in an installation at SUNY Purchase next year. In a piece designed to highlight different aspects of the campus’s ecology, milkweed, echinacea, bee balm and more will burst from planters built into a network of benches, some bringing nature into the constructed environment and others immersing people in the nature around them.

Dalrymple moved to New York City in 1994, after graduating from Hamilton College with a Fine Arts degree. At that time, she saw herself primarily as a painter, and her interest in working from nature often took her upstate. “Reverse commuting,” she would spend the work week staying in cheap motels, painting landscapes on farms in the Hudson Valley, then finish the pieces back in her studio in the city.

A few years later, she started gardening, and it hit her that she could engage with the natural world right at home.

“Suddenly it was like a little whisper,” Dalrymple says. “Nature in the city, nature in the city…”

As she began to explore this idea in her art, Dalrymple found she was part of a growing movement to tune in to urban nature and natural history, and to create a greener, more environmentally resilient city. Hudson River Park was taking shape where a highway had once been planned. Eric Sanderson was working on his Manahatta Project, documenting the waterways, terrain, flora and fauna of Manhattan before the arrival of Europeans. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC Parks launched the MillionTreesNYC initiative.

In her painting, Dalrymple turned her focus to local green spaces, from tree pits to the city’s many parks. Her lush scenes, often saturated with greens and blues, range from details of plant and animal life to panoramic vistas, sometimes incorporating elements of maps or collage and shifting the perspective within the frame. At the same time, she earned a certificate in horticulture from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, became a licensed city tree pruner through Trees New York, and collaborated with environmental organizations around the city on “plein air” outdoor painting events, botanical drawing classes and more.

Dalrymple says working with plants and adding social and educational practices to her work has changed how she thinks of herself as an artist.

“I used to see myself as a painter, but that doesn’t entirely fit anymore,” she says. “I’m more of an interdisciplinary eco-artist — that’s how I would describe myself now.”

Even so, painting remains a central part of her art.

After moving to her current studio in Gowanus in 2011, she became interested in the history and development of the area and collaborated with the Gowanus Conservancy on a series of paintings depicting the neighborhood’s past, present and imagined future. In 2022, she created a similar piece for City Harvest’s Artist Initiative when the food bank moved to its current location in Sunset Park. The painting shows the building beside a historic stream that once flowed where Second Avenue is. Like dozens of other “ghost streams,” it now runs below the city, contributing to potholes and flooding. The painting also depicts an optimistic future of urban design addressing climate change, including a rooftop meadow and permeable pavement that lower temperatures and absorb stormwater.

“We need to develop reciprocal relationships with nature, which starts by envisioning and learning about it so we can better care for our urban green spaces and waterways,” Dalrymple says. “This can improve the health and well-being of all the city’s inhabitants — plant, animal and human.”

To join Dalrymple on a free Mindful Nature Journaling Hike this summer and fall, find her on Eventbrite.

Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn: Sunday, July 26, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Forest Park, Queens: Sunday, July 26, 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Pugsley Creek Park, Bronx: Sunday, August 30, 2:30 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Owl’s Head Park, Brooklyn: Sunday, September 27, 2 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Riverside Park, Manhattan: Sunday, October 25, 2 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.