Liz Cutler's Pressed Flower Art

This is a post to honor the work and artistry of one of Princeton's great environmental educators, Liz Cutler. I first knew Liz as founding director of the nonprofit OASIS (Organizing Action on Sustainability In Schools), which promoted sustainability at 23 area schools. As sustainability director at Princeton Day School, she organized school garden tours and climate summits focused on mobilizing and empowering the next generation. Once a year, PDS would send a hundred kids to Mountain Lakes for community workdays back when I was the resource manager there. Later, we served together on the Princeton Environmental Film Festival committee.

Since leaving PDS, Liz says she's been consulting with schools all over the country to help them become more environmentally sustainable. One particularly nice-sounding gig: she spent this past winter as Master Teacher-in-Residence at The Island School in The Bahamas helping their young faculty improve their teaching practice.

To her extraordinary environmental work has more recently been added extraordinary art, specifically pressed flower compositions. According to Liz, what "began as a meditation in 2020 has become a creative manifestation of my love of nature and of my life's work as an environmental educator." 

Less than two years after she started creating her many and varied compositions of pressed flowers, the Princeton Public Library hosted an exhibit of her work. 

She now has a website, LizCutlerPressedFlowers, where she makes prints of her original compositions available for purchase as lasting gifts. The website is an opportunity to check out all her lovely work, and includes a description of her process. Twenty percent of all proceeds go to benefit The Watershed Institute and the D&R Greenway Land Trust.