A Shirt With a Story Behind It

At first glance, it’s just a design on a shirt—flowers, vegetables, animals. But the longer you look, the more you start to recognize things. The same blooms you pass on your morning walk. The vegetables that are growing just a few steps from your site. The animals that wander through like they’ve been here longer than any of us.

And that’s because they have.

This year’s design was created by our own Robin Dorsey, and it’s not just inspired by the park—it’s built from it.

Forty hours, one block of wood

Before anything was printed—or even digitized—this started as a hand drawing.

Robin sketched every element you see on the shirt individually. Each flower, each vegetable, each animal—drawn with intention, not pulled from anywhere else. It all came from what we grow here, what we see here, and what we love about this place in the summertime.

Once the drawing was finished, it was projected onto a block of wood and carefully traced.

From there, Robin carved the entire design by hand—cutting away the negative space, shaping the lines, and refining details directly into the block itself.

All in, that process took about 40 hours.

The kind of work you don’t rush.

Like a stamp, but a little more special

Once the carving was done, the block became the print.

Using a traditional woodcut method—basically like a very detailed stamp—the design was hand-printed onto paper. Each print captured the texture of the carving, the slight variations, the little imperfections that make it feel real. From there, it was scanned, and the final version was prepped for screen printing.

So even though the finished shirt looks clean and polished, it still carries all of that original work underneath it.

A snapshot of summer at the park

One of the best parts of this design is what’s actually in it.

Everything on the shirt reflects something real here at Jim & Mary’s—things we grow, things we see, and, in a lot of cases, things we genuinely love. Staff favorites made their way in, along with the everyday details that make summer here what it is.

It’s a snapshot of American robins, fox squirrels, butterflies and swallowtails, chili peppers, geraniums, raspberries, pansies, bitterroot, and more.

If you’ve spent time here during the summer, you’ve probably seen at least a few of them—maybe without even realizing it.

Something you can take with you

What I like about this shirt is that it doesn’t just look nice—it actually means something.

It holds a season. A place. A bunch of small, familiar things that, together, make this park what it is.

And whether you’re here for a weekend or you come back year after year, it’s a pretty nice way to take a little piece of that with you.