Designing with Nature at the V&A Dundee
An Offshoot episode recorded in Dundee:
From self-watering flat pack origami pots from Potr to knitted hydroponic sculptures — reimagining gardens for the future. Listen Now:
Also available on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts
Episode Summary:
In this offshoot episode of Our Plant Stories, we step into Garden Futures - Designing with Nature — an imaginative new exhibition at the V&A Dundee. Originally from the Vitra Design Museum, this exhibition has been reimagined with stories from Scotland and the rest of the UK. It looks at gardens as places of “productivity, pleasure and regeneration”. But this exhibition doesn’t just look at garden design from a historical perspective though there are beautiful artifacts from gardens of centuries past, it looks to the future and new ideas about sustainability and biodiversity.
The first room was hung with garden tools, the watering can, the spade and you realise how many of our garden tools haven’t changed over the centuries. But this is a design museum and what I loved about the exhibition, and we explore in this episode, is what happens when people think outside the box. What if plant pots were flat-packed, no big bulky parcel just a flat envelope that fits through your letterbox?
Andrew with one of his pots
New Garden Ideas - Pots
This is a plant pot designed by POTR. In the episode I talk to Andrew Flynn, co-founder of POTR who make self watering plant pots from recycled waste, including waste washed up on our shores from the fishing industry.
Andrew explains how during lockdown he received a gift of 3 plant pots, except what he actually received was one plant pot and a load of broken shards from the two pots that got damaged en route. It set him and his wife thinking:
“We wondered — what’s the carbon footprint of the humble plant pot?”
Add in some early influences from Andrew’s mum, who loved origami and what emerges is an idea for a plant pot, made from recycled plastic, using origami to make it flat-pack so it will simply fit though your letter box. They then threw in the idea of using capillary action via a cord from a water reserve into the soil to allow the plant to sip water as and when it needed it. And I can vouch that my small Monstera which I confess had been looking a little thirsty is now looking so much happier in its new POTR!
New Garden Ideas - hydroponics
Francesca Bibbi, worked as a curator for 18 months on this new exhibition and I asked her to take me to one of her favourite parts of it. She had been inspired by working with living artists and led me to Alice Marie Archer’s incredible ‘sculptures’, hanging baskets, made of willow with a knitted ‘skin’ embedded with different seeds. When the whole piece becomes damp the sculpture will sprout. A hydroponic system of germination that doesn’t use plastic but wool that can be laid on the soil. Alice has described this as:
“a kind of gift for the planet... a healing blanket for the ground.”
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t yet downloaded the Hospitalfield Garden episode I recorded in the playground of Ladyloan primary school and Hospitalfield garden, both in Arbroath in Scotland, then I would love you to take a listen. I think there are connections between both these V&A stories and the Nigel Dunnett RHS Chelsea garden which is being relocated to the school. Coastal erosion and climate change and the mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle, requires solutions forged through creative thinking, demonstrated so well, by artists and designers such as Alice Marie Archer and Andrew Flynn. How do you nuture that creative thinking in the next generation - I think Ladyloan Primary school’s collaboration with Hospitalfield through their Project Giving Back garden, could be one example.
Support the Show
This podcast is independently made by me. I research, record, edit and present and produce it. If you’d like to help keep it growing, please consider supporting it via Buy Me a Coffee.