Posted: November 05, 2026
Tucked away on the south side of Columbus lies an ambitious ethnobotanical garden dedicated to connecting the community surrounding it with native plants, medicinal plants, and herbalism. A 2025 grant from the Franklin County Conservation District helped transform a poison hemlock grove into the Pollen Patch garden. The founder, Sheena Hanscel, interprets urban growing in a unique way.
Through stewardship of medicinal plant relatives that indigenous ancestors of the land worked with and native plantings, the garden focuses on pollinator health and ecological resilience. However, the primary mission of the garden centers around education and preserving the wisdom of indigenous herbalism. The garden hosts events and DIY workshops that connect community members to ancestral skills—from medicine making to gift making. They teach that plants are conscious beings that are here to care for us and how we can connect with plants. Workshop attendees and community members can meet and connect with the plants they’re working with out in the garden and engage in Indigenous Plant Listening—an ancestral practice of observing plants to learn their properties.
The founder of the Pollen Patch, Sheena, is an indigenous artist and educator. The workshops she facilitates focus on teaching practical, ancestral skills that empower people to reclaim self-care autonomy, while building reciprocal relationships with plants and the land. Her master’s degree in social work and experience as a mental health therapist informs her current work, allowing it to be trauma-aware and grounded in real-life application. Her work is also informed by her Native American heritage and connection to natural remedies passed down through her Cherokee grandmother.
Connection is an important philosophy in the garden. Sheena shared her connection to the work in an artist statement: “Creating living art is my way of participating in an ongoing relationship with my ancestors, the Plant Nation and the future generations yet to come. My work takes the form of floral arrangements and herbal remedies that carry the gifts of our plant relatives beyond the garden and into the everyday lives of my community. Before a plant becomes part of my work, I have already spent months to years building a relationship with them in my garden, the Pollen Patch. My art helps me connect to a way of life that existed before everything we needed could be bought from a shelf and explore the relationships that have been forgotten due to modern day convenience. My art is not an attempt to recreate the past, but a response to the absence of knowledge not handed down due to the colonization of my Indigenous people and culture. My work invites people to experience plant relatives not as a product, but as a being whose purpose has always been to care for us.”
