In 2024, we were selected to create a border garden design for The Gardeners World Live Exhibition at the NEC. The Growing Project team designed a silver award winning border garden that reflected our wider work in exploring social and environmental repair within the context of post-industrial canalside sites in Digbeth. This Canalside heritage site literally holds Digbeth’s history in its soil. As such, the land here contains toxic heavy metals, including lead and arsenic, at levels that are above the safe limits for humans, other animals, and plants. Yet despite this, life flourishes here.
Our design created a mini version of this canalside space including a model canal edge, we used plants to tell the story of what happens when humans disturb soil and how plants can step into restore balance. The border included campion and celandine, nettles, clover, willowherb, and achillea bob. Among these hardy, predictable characters we told the story of our experimentation with phytoremediators; sunflowers and mustard greens, water Crowfoot, and red fescue. The garden and our wider Growing Project programme was featured on a Gardeners World TV show in June 2024 platforming our transformative social and environmental work.
The garden also reflected our wider collaborative work with artist collective Cooking Sections which explored this Canalside site as a site for a body of work called “Field Commissions”, which began as a series of year-long artistic commissions in 2021 with Asad Raza.
Plant delivery for Grand Union’s Gardeners’ World Live border. Birmingham, 2024.
The resulting border design tells a beautiful story of resistance that flourishes despite adversity, how nature is able to remediate and also what we can do as humans to support remediation.
Designed by Kieran & Matt
Raised and created by Kieran, Matt, The Cultivators
Installed with Support from the wider Growing Project Community, Avalon Landscapes