Work in Progress

Constructing the Physic Garden

Our plan had been to produce the hard landscaping of the garden in the way many art productions take place. Quickly and efficiently with compartmentalised roles and expertise, weaving in embedded workshops and volunteering days to make sure all women could put their hands on it.

But then Covid. We sat under the hawthorn tree and asked ourselves what was more important - to build the garden later on or to build a garden for women to recover in.

We decided to let go of everything we knew and to begin instead by hand. One stone at a time.

Our team 

We hadn't anticipated that a new community of women would join us - whose work and plans had also evaporated.
​Samira and Jaheda joined us for the daily work - amongst other things they are musicians and work as freelance theatre technicians in lighting and costume, together we have moved every stone and touched every patch of earth. Anita is a master dry stone waller, we met her three years ago when she taught us at a women's walling workshop, Liz and Jai are She Digs a recently established gardening duo,  Alys our plantswoman,  - one of the first women we asked to join us on this endeavour to make a physic garden, Charmian and the Idle Women sisterhood in daily contact for perspective, Uzma a past Idle Women caretaker and Ellie a stage-manger spent the Autumn with us and others came to the team for short specialist jobs like Gillian the tree surgeon, Cathy and Diane the electricians and Pamela the digger lady.

Where are we now - November 2021

We've worked together for a year now, behind the scenes, creatively making decisions that we want to last for one hundred  years, calling to mind the women we love who aren't with us and imagining them in the garden as it takes shape, feeling humbled to work outside so freely and the joy of getting to know each other in a way that is unique to the emersion of creative collaboration, trusting each other through the risk of not knowing, constructing something that we can't see, on days when we are collectively in grief because the rage we feel isn't specific to this pandemic but it's amplified by the global picture and the consequence of our actions and the weight of neglected responsibility and we want this garden to be more than a garden and as Samira says, we want the earth to remember us so through every weather we have laughed, cried and laboured and we have a way to go still but we don't yet know how far or how long it will take because we are working this our one stone at a time.

Physic Garden background