Planting seeds of wonder
Botany Bay Project 2022
 |
| we don't need to think in straight lines |
When we plant a garden, we are planting stories. And when we know those stories, when we understand them, they can help our garden grow and enrich our lives in more ways than simply giving us food to eat.
We were telling stories. From the Three Sisters of North America to the Blue Corn Maiden and the sharpness of Grandmother’s Tongue from the deserts of Arizona. There were the round curving wonders of mango reappearing in “paisley pattern” fabrics. There were the eyes of a Polynesian eel looking out of a coconut
“BOTANY BAY is a Participation and Learning project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project makes use of the migration histories of plants and crops, and their Indigenous cultural heritage in relation to ecology and reciprocity, as a way to stimulate young people to explore new ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have made a re-assessment and recalibration of human relationships to the non-human an urgent necessity, and young people have to be at the heart of this process, forging a future for humanity and the planet.” Introduction from the Botany Bay page
Find out more: Botany Bay
There are other workshops invovled with visits from Museum teams, trips to the Garden Museum: check in at the Botany Bay link aboe for a fuller picture of the whole flwoering of this project!
As Creeping Toad, I have come into Botany Bay as a storyteller and creator of celebrations. My first sessions with the gardening schools was a mixture of telling stories, listening to ideas, provoking discussions and being a supportive voice around wild imaginings. We told stories. We scribbled, thought, scribbled again, pouring collective garden ideas on sheets….could we grow strawberries? Bananas? Dragonfruit? Do kiwi fruit grow on trees? At this stage in the planting of our school gardens, the gardeners were shaping ideas: what? How? Where? When? The control of their garden is being repeatedly returned to these young gardeners. The project is pushing those gardening groups to do the research (will bananas ripen in a UK summer?). The challenge is as much about understanding and appreciating changing worlds as actually getting a rich crop. So we talked about what might grow (with rewarding detours into climate change and young people’s awareness of hotter summers and possible consequences (back to bananas, but how do we find out if we can grow vanilla?). Those first traditional stories came back: can we plant in Three Sisters patterns (not always successful in damp UK climes)? Raising more questions than answers just now but that is good.
 | |
| Rabbit Parties? |
We were thinking of our gardens as more than simply “places where we plant things”. We talked about the experience a garden could offer (big stones for sitting on, as happy as a cat on all fours, mesmerising were all suggestions), what we could do with these plants we were growing, what else we should include (trampolines, a hot-tub, but also secret bee hives, bug-hotels and ponds). Conversations grew into ways of sharing, celebrating and appreciating our gardens: recognising that the plants we are growing and the animals associated with them are living acts of generosity for us and that we should find ways of thanking the world around us. Possible celebrations escalated:
My parents do Caribbean street food – can someone come and teach us how to cook our special foods?
Crumble days (almost universally approved of – apple crumble, plum, blueberry who know what else we could crumble with!
Can we produce our own recipe book
Strawberry picnics
Milk shake day and an ice cream festival with flavours grown in the garden
A rice festival
A corn feast
Pie day: with all the pie fillings grown in our garden
Can we grow dyes and make tie-dyed T-shirts to wear or sell?
Can we have a market stall?
“What can we do with the richness of our gardens” continued to spiral into celebrations
The Great Chiswick/Chorlton/Waltham/Medlock Bake Off (we’d be the judges)
A video game day – powered by pedals or solar panels
A music day: could we write tunes about our plants and maybe make instruments….and of course could we write songs to celebrate gardens
At other times, ideas turned down more sinister (or just plain strange)routes. Could we grow a boiled egg tree? If we planted a pupil, could we grow a Dead Kids Tree with shrunken heads instead of apples…we all decided “maybe not”. Liking the grisly but powerful image, suddenly we were wondering about designing graphic novels about life and nightmares in a garden
By the end of 4 days of workshops in our 5 different schools, my head was spinning
As the Botany Bay gardens start growing, my role will be to drop in and help develop ideas about celebration and appreciation. The working questions are “how do we share our gardens” and “how do we thank our plants” and “how do we tell our stories”. Listening to stories from the deserts of central America or tales of melons from southern Africa is exciting but we need to find the connection that roots chilis or melons in our gardens in urban England and in our communities.
We are setting out to grow gardens but also to grow our own new stories of richness and wonder and feasts that feed body, heart and soul all at the same time.
With many thanks to our gardening schools: for their enthusiasm and hospitality - and their bravery in setting out to plant wild, growing gardens rich with stories
Cavendish Primary School, Chiswick
Chiswick High School
Hurst Drive Primary School, Waltham Cross
Medlock Primary School, Manchester
Oswald Rd Primary School, Manchester
Botany Bay is a project produced by Border Crossings' ORIGINS Festival
Photos: all image c/o G MacLellan:
not all schools are represented here - more photos will be added!
