“My art is the creative manifestation of the professional work I’ve been doing my entire life, which is helping people fall in love with nature. We humans only save what we love.”  — Liz Cutler, Sustainability Advocate

Liz began this remarkable journey as a teacher at Princeton Day School with a love for nature and literature. In 2005, she launched a whole school sustainability initiative alongside other stakeholders and became the Founding Director of OASIS (Organizing Action on Sustainability in Schools), a non-profit consortium of approximately 50 NJ schools working together to help each other become more sustainable. 

Liz continues to inspire a conservation ethic through her artwork today. Her ornate collages, made from real flowers and other objects found on quiet walks, are created through a process that preserves the natural environment. The beauty of her collages helps people slow down and appreciate their deep connection to nature.

On June 9th, at the Greenway Gala, Liz’s work will be honored by
D&R Greenway with the presentation of the
Donald B. Jones Conservation Award

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About Liz Cutler

“Honey, come in,” my father calls “it’s getting dark.” I’ve been sitting on the grass for three hours next to the towering linden tree watching a line of ants, like the good soldiers they are, move in a pattern up and down the giant trunk. I am seven.

Hours after they cut down our neighbor’s Russian pine and haul away her branches, I am on my knees in the remaining wood chips counting the rings now visible on the stump. She was 72; I am 14.

If I stay in the meadow long enough, can I see the fiddlehead fern unfurl from its tight birth spiral?

We lie, my eight-year-old son and I, on the smooth Precambrian rock, part of the Canadian Shield, warming our backs, and we watch the clouds. “Tell me again the difference between cirrus and stratus, Mom, ok? That one looks like a dragon.” I am 46.

I slip away from our house for a few minutes hoping for a little respite. Our son, now 26, is in the final stages of brain cancer. I walk through the meadow, along the creek, around the block, or into the garden to rub my hands through the mint, bring them to my face and inhale, always gathering gathering, gathering: wild blossoms, silver grass, ground cherry leaves cut into careful patterns by hungry flea beetles, the first tiny maple seeds, the glittery wings of a dead cicada, or an errant blue jay feather that floats to the path. Looking closely, I count the Fibonacci numbers in the orange zinnia on my neighbor’s lawn. I am 65.

I press these gathered treasures, magnificence in the minute, between pages of white paper, weighted down by my sons’ high school chemistry and physics textbooks. “Be patient,” say the flowers, “and in a few days we will be papery and stiff, ready for you to give us a second life in your art.” My youngest son has taught me how to slow down, how to wait, how to take one beautiful moment, breathe it in, hold it close.

Had you asked, I would have said I didn’t have an artistic cell in my body. I never took an art or a science class beyond what was required in school, but the beauty of each acorn and shell, each wildflower and weed calls from me curiosity and a hidden creativity, providing exactly the balm a mother needs in those long silent hours of watching her son die. Off duty tonight, my husband at Isaac’s bedside, I hide at the desk newly stashed in the walk-in closet and lose myself in pressed flower composition. I place purple next to yellow, drawn like an insect to the contrast, a strategy flowers use to raise their chances of pollination. Sometimes my artwork is place-based, an attempt to capture the look of a Cape Cod meadow on a single bright fall day or a mid-summer dune along the southern tip of Lake Michigan or the feeling of nightfall in a June garden on my street. Every part of this practice is a meditation: the close looking at nature, the identification, the pressing and waiting, the careful placement and replacement of the dried flowers and leaves, the meticulous gluing with tweezers, toothpicks, paintbrush, and Q-tips.

A year later, I have 25 large pieces and I have been asked to do a show at the Princeton Public Library. In writing the artist statement, I realize that this practice is the creative manifestation of my decades of observing and of the professional work I have been doing my entire life: helping children fall in love with nature, first through literature, then through creating a whole school sustainability program, and now coaching schools across the country. People only save what they love.

Humans were evolved to be in nature, but few of us really interact with it. We walk past it, we use it, mow it, own it, waste it, and then retreat to our screens. Research shows that the more time we spend in nature, the healthier we are physically and psychologically. The first assignment in Song of the Wild, the high school nature and literature course I taught for 35 years, was to have students sit on the ground and look at one square foot of earth—closely—for 20 minutes and then write about what they saw, heard, felt, and smelled. They were astonished. I wasn’t. Most of us look at nature, but we don’t actually see it. That only happens by slowing down. What I love about teaching literature is offering opportunities for students to grapple with the deepest parts of being human: our relationship to each other and to the planet, helping them understand themselves as individuals and as part of a larger pattern, like the petals on that orange zinnia.

But the part of my teaching career that challenged and taught me the most was creating an entire school sustainability program from nothing, working simultaneously on curriculum, institutional behavior, and facilities. I learned how to talk with everyone from custodians and food service workers to the faculty and board of trustees, connecting with each in their own sphere about climate change and climate justice. It enlarged the patience I’d learned from caring for my disabled son to a place where I could listen first and talk second, advocating for the natural world I loved. When I began the school program, sustainability was hardly a word, much less a discipline, and people were just beginning to understand climate change. All I knew at first was that my goal was to help others fall in love with nature, to help people ask the question: “where does it come from and where does it go” in every part of our lives. From my earliest memories, I have loved observing, contemplating, and learning about the natural world. It has become a habit of the heart.

I collect carefully, conscious of which flowers are ephemeral or how many are growing in a patch, and whether my taking one or two will matter to their survival. As I write this, the late afternoon light throws long shadows from trees now bare of their leaves, stark, winter closing in. It’s a different kind of beauty. There is nothing left to pick, but my closet desk drawers burst with labeled bags of sunshine: flowers and leaves, stems and stamens, even an intact eastern Swallowtail butterfly I found dead on the road.  They beg to be slowly and quietly drawn into a picture for a second life through art, to remind me that mine is a story of grace and gratitude, and to help others see, perhaps for the first time, the beauty of nature. I lose myself in the meditation.”