Maine Maritime Museum welcomes Maria Salcines from Fogwood Gardens and a team of floral artists to create floral installations using local flowers, sustainable mechanics, and native plants growing right here on our landscape. A walk around the historic shipyard will reveal arrangements built to honor Maine’s history and culture by using props such as old lobster traps. We will also highlight how sustainable floristry impacts the quality of our environments, supports Maine’s small farms and connects people to the plants. Flowers bring people together, so let’s celebrate the turn of the season as a community on this unique Maine waterfront.
Self-guided tours of the floral installations are included with museum admission.
WORKSHOP
Build Your Own Bouquet with Maria Salcines of Fogwood Gardens
2:00–4:00 pm | $75, members receive a 20% discount; includes all materials, no prior experience necessary
Create your own bouquet using locally grown flowers! Each participant will receive a bucket of blooms containing a balanced recipe of foliage, filler, and focal flowers. Maria will show you how to use the spiral technique to build bouquets with structure, drama, and intentional color.
Maria Salcines of Fogwood Gardens is a floral artist and flower grower who creates seasonally inspired floral sculptures that tell a story. She designs with bold color, offerings from the landscapes, and the belief that flowers have a language of their own. She honors her stewardship to the land by using sustainable, reusable mechanics, and locally grown or foraged blooms. Maria believes that people are meant to gather around flowers, and that they can be repurposed into different art forms. Through various preservation techniques, Maria encourages people to spend more time with flowers and enjoy them at all stages.
GUIDED TOUR & LECTURE
5:30–7:30 pm | Pay what you can
The evening begins with a guided tour of the flower installations with the designers. Attendees will then convene in Long Reach Hall for a presentation from Dr. Ankit Singh about the history of flower farming in Maine.
Drawing on conversations with flower growers throughout Maine, this presentation from Dr. Ankit Singh offers a behind-the-scenes look at the state’s vibrant flower farming industry. Attendees will learn about the seasonal rhythms, market opportunities, labor demands, climate challenges, and community connections that influence local flower production. Featuring stories and photographs from farms across Maine, the session highlights the people, practices, and passion behind Maine-grown flowers.
Dr. Ankit Kumar Singh is an Assistant Extension Professor with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, where his work focuses on specialty crop production, controlled environment agriculture, and sustainable horticultural systems. Through extensive engagement with flower growers across Maine, his research and Extension programs explore the opportunities and challenges of farming in northern climates, including seasonality, labor, markets, and climate resilience. In parallel, Dr. Singh collaborates on research in space agriculture, investigating how lessons from extreme growing environments, from greenhouses in Maine to plant production systems designed for space, can help advance the future of sustainable agriculture on Earth. His expertise has been featured by NPR, Maine Public Radio, NBC10 Boston, Martha Stewart Magazine, and the 2026 Old Farmer’s Almanac.