Resilient Gardens

A day-long event for anyone gardening with sustainability in mind. Join us to explore how to design gardens that genuinely sustain life.

This year, our headline event will feature landscape designer Marian Boswall, author of The Kindest Garden.

Marian will talk through some of the very practical and thoughtful approaches we can take in any scale garden, from choosing plants to suit the stage of your garden’s soil, to creating a self supporting ecosystem above and below ground, to creating community resilience through gardening, and beauty through intention.

"Resilience means adapting our gardens and landscapes to survive better through extremes, including wet and dry weather. When added together, our millions of small interventions could also rebalance some of the effects of these climatic shifts".

Marian Boswall

We will also hear from Holly Silvester of The Gaia Foundation and East Neuk Market Garden, who will explore the fascinating subject of seed sovreignty and how on a local level, we can build resilience into the systems that we rely on for sustanance.

"Seeds and humans have co-evolved since the beginning of our existence – there is a deep history of relationship where we worked in collaboration with plants, forming a reciprocal relationship that allowed both plants and humans to thrive. But somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that; the impact of which we’re only now fully realising. As gardeners and growers, we’ve come to view seed as a commodity as there’s been an increasing lack of access to locally grown, climate adaptive seed. We’ve become disconnected and therefore disempowered from seed stewardship. But what could be possible if we start to restore this relationship? In the seemingly insignificant act of growing a few seeds, we could all be restoring resilience and to our gardens, and contributing to transformational change".

Holly Silvester

Itinerary:

10:30 - Teas and coffee on arrival

11:00 - Welcome

11:15 - Split guests into two groups for guided tour of the compost trail with Head Gardener Callum Halstead / Creative workshop with graphic designer Seb Chaloner

12:15 - Short break, then groups swap over

13:30 - Buffet Lunch

14:15 - Talk from Holly Silvester

15:30 - Talk from Marian Boswall

16:45 - Evening drinks in the gardens