The Abolitionist’s Sanctuary, located on N. Robertson St. in New Orleans, is a space for connection and reflection, tucked away from the most active streets of the Seventh Ward. The gardens have experienced many different design iterations since jackie sumell and others started stewarding them in 2007, including The 7th Ward Boys & Girls/ Rainbows & Unicorns Garden, A Garden to Dye For, and are home to the first-ever Solitary Garden, first grown in collaboration with Albert Woodfox in 2014.

Each plant grown in the Sanctuary is chosen with purpose. Whether native, naturalized, or long stigmatized as weeds or invasive, every species carries political, cultural, and medicinal significance. Plants like cotton, okra, indigo, mugwort, and yarrow tell stories of survival, displacement, labor, and liberation. These gardens become not only places of beauty and rest, but living archives—embodying the histories, symbolisms, and ancestral knowledge that connect environmental justice to prison abolition.

The Sanctuary is animated year-round by a wide range of public programming: transformative justice circles, concerts, student tours, and plant-based mutual aid efforts like seed sharing and community apothecaries. It is not just a garden, but a transformative praxis—a space where people impacted by the carceral state can reconnect with land, with each other, and with themselves. Here, healing is not a metaphor—it’s material. It’s in the compost, in the hands that plant, and in the radical dreams that grow alongside the okra and wild fennel.

We love to grow together. If you have ideas for programming in the gardens, please reach out to us!