Oasis in the Woods Arts and Wellness Festival Samaria Marley

For one week, June 12-16, 2023, artists of diverse disciplines and ages will converge at Juniper's Garden for a week-long residency. Their collective goal is to build generational bridges while working with ideas and materials that emanate from the land to create installations that answer the question, "How we will rebuild our communities to be stronger and recreate sustainable places to live." Importantly, this conversation addresses environmental justice's physical and psychological dimensions and impact. The residency occurred in Maryland's Prince Georges's County, the Southernmost region and its remaining rural tier.

About the Facilitators, Samaria is a farmer, herbalist, and co-owner of Junipers Garden. She has worked in agriculture and food justice in the D.C. metro region for over ten years. Her innovative and visionary approach has helped to usher in accessible models of food access and community-centered care. She developed the first low-cost C.S.A. model, C.R.I.S.P., in DC in 2016. Then went on to manage The Farm at Kelly Miller in NE DC for four years. She is also the co-founder of the D.C. Mutual Aid Apothecary, a mutual aid organization that connects people to herbal medicine, education, and community.

She began her herbalism journey in 2015 and has studied with Wild Ginger Herbal Center, Well of Indigenous Wisdom, and the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. She is also a 2022 Braiding Seeds Fellow. Samaria and her partner Blain recently opened Junipers Garden, a small-scale vegetable and medicinal herb farm in Brandywine, MD, whose mission is to provide a space for black and brown people to be on land, reclaim their ancestral healing and farming practices, traditions, and seeds and gain access to valuable knowledge and resources. The farm hosts seasonal events, herbalism workshops, retreats, and natural building workshops.