Origami plant pots
I confess I have never been good at origami. Though I wish I was, I have always thought that the ability to produce a frog or a swan from a sheet of paper, is a great skill to have. I now think I should have tried harder and encouraged my children to learn too! Andrew Flynn’s mum was keen and armed with the origami skills he has designed a flat pack plant pot.
The Potr flat pack plant pot
Luckily for the rest of us the instructions on how to build the Potr plant pot are very simple. If you listen to this weeks episode you will hear Andrew tell his story. On this way to designing the plant pot he worked in product design for Dyson and an electric car firm. The inspiration to design the plant pot came from receiving a package which was supposed to contain 3 clay pots and arrived with one pot and many clay shards. This set him and his wife to thinking what was the carbon footprint of transporting a large amount of air, wrapped in copious amounts of bubble wrap, all to no avail. The ‘out of the box’ thinking was ‘why don’t pots come flat packed’ and from that he worked backwards to solve the problem.
I love learning about that kind of creative thinking. I am sure it is what Rachel in Ladyloan primary school is hoping for her pupils when she seeks to put art and creativity and nature into children’s daily learning. For Andrew he could have gone one of two ways - art or science, and the joy of this project is that he has combined the two.
As you will hear in the episode he is not the only one coming up with creative solutions to tricky problems. Also in the Garden Futures - Designing with Nature exhibition at the V&A in Dundee are some wonderful willow structures that have a knitted skin embedded with seeds by the artist Alice-Marie Archer. They can’t allow them to get wet in the V&A but apparently as soon as they become moist the seeds begin to germinate. Francesca, one of the curators, described it as hydroponics without the problematic plastic. I was reminded how one of our number in the Museum of Homelessness garden comes from Azerbaijan and he was puzzled as to why we were putting seeds into soil to germinate. Back home, he would always lay seeds on a piece of fabric which would be kept damp whilst the seeds began to grow. We tried it for the Ethiopian pumpkin seeds with great results.
Finally there has been a great addition to the Our Plant Stories marketing kit this week. If you head over to ourplantstories_podcast on Instagram you will see me modelling it! Back in RHS Chelsea week I helped out at the Plant Heritage stand, on the Saturday before the show, when a high-vis jacket was mandatory. It so happened that I was meeting my cousin that evening for a birthday treat and I had opted for a surprise. So when she mentioned that I should bring along a high-vis jacket I thought, no problem, I have one of those. The security man in the bag search of Sadlers Wells, as we queued for the ballet, looked at me very strangely when he saw the bright yellow jacket in my bag! However this weekend she presented me with my own special high-vis jacket embroidered with the Our Plant Stories logo on the back - it really is a work of art. So you might spot me casually wearing it as I walk around gardens, a one-woman walking billboard!
The V&A exhibition in Dundee is on until the 25th January 2026:
From windowsill plants and manicured lawns, to allotments and green spaces in unlikely places, gardens hold different meanings for everyone. Explore groundbreaking garden design by visionaries like Piet Oudolf and Derek Jarman, alongside innovative work from leading artists, writers and designers, such as Duncan Grant, Jamaica Kincaid and William Morris.
Have a lovely weekend
Sally
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