Students can make a toast to land conservation this Saturday at the “Spirit of the Land” benefit – a wine tasting and art sale hosted jointly by the Athens Land Trust and Oconee River Land Trust.

The benefit will be held at the Georgia Botanical Garden Visitor Center and feature a tasting of high-quality wines from Gosford Wine, a silent auction, live music, hors d'oeuvres from Five and Ten restaurant and the sale of fine art by well-known local and regional artists. All proceeds will benefit land conservation efforts in the Athens area.

“The purpose of the event is to raise awareness about land conservation,” said Nancy Stangle, the development director for the Athens Land Trust.

Both Athens Land Trust and the Oconee River Land Trust are non-profit organizations, and all the benefit’s proceeds will be split between conservation efforts and the artists whose works are sold at the auction.

“We asked artists just to give us their work that reflects the beauty of land, so they are mostly landscapes,” Stangle said of the art featured for sale at the benefit. “Forty-five percent of the proceeds go to the artists – we wanted to support the artists in their work.”

One of these artists is Rinne Allen, a local who uses her garden and her mother’s garden as subjects for her artwork.

Allen contributed two pieces to the benefit, which she made by using a kind of old-fashioned photography method. Her photographs of plants are put on watercolor paper with a light-sensitive chemical and then left to expose naturally in the sun.

The result is “ghost-like, almost like a shadow,” Allen said.

“I thought it fit the title of the event well,” she said. “It’s almost like the ghost or spirit of the plant.”