In this year’s closing Botanical Letter, Cleidi Hearn turns her attention to the quiet, grounding force of the handmade — and what it offers at a time when images are generated faster than thoughts, and seasons seem to pass in a blur of digital acceleration.

Through the soft luminosity of Cloud Dancer, Pantone’s 2026 colour, the essay reflects on why gentleness has become a form of cultural intelligence. It considers how an ethereal white, almost-weightless tone can speak to our hunger for calm, for materials touched by human hands, for the small rituals of beauty that remind us we are still connected to the natural world — even as technology races ahead.

In Decolonizing Botanical Memory: Reclaiming Brazil’s Plant Stories Through Textile Art, Cleidi Hearn traces the enduring arc of botanical exploitation in Brazil — from the colonial felling of pau-brasil for European dyes to today’s global trade in açaí and other so-called “superfoods.” She reveals how colonial science and commerce severed plants from the cosmologies and communities that once revered them as kin, reducing living beings to extractable resources.

Viewed through a decolonial lens, this second Botanical Letter invites readers to reimagine Brazil’s flora not as commodities, but as companions — living archives whose silenced stories still wait to be remembered, honoured, and carried forward.

In Textiles as Ecological Memory: Preserving Brazil’s Plant Wisdom in Contemporary Art, Cleidi Hearn explores how textile art can serve as a living archive for the cultural and ecological knowledge embedded in Brazil’s native flora. Drawing on the deep history of linen — from ancient Egyptian burial rites to rural Brazilian homespun — she frames fabric not as a passive surface, but as an active witness to the resilience of plants and the communities that have protected them.

Blending botanical history, decolonial thought, and contemporary art practice, this inaugural Botanical Letter invites readers to see textiles as more than aesthetic objects — as vessels of memory, resistance, and renewal.