This year, as part of the completion of Phase 1 of our Capital work at SSW we started to slowly cultivate a Materials Garden. The Materials Garden is currently formed of a number of raised beds and recently cleared borders that now contain plants for natural dyeing and various willow and small tree varieties for future use in creating armatures, ash glazes and green wood working. These plants are joined by a wide range of pollinators that add to the bio-diversity of the SSW site as well as herbs which can be consumed to support wellbeing.
Our choice of what to grow has come from the participants of our Winter and Spring Community Making Space programmes. It has come through their local knowledge, alongside local farmers and other Lumsden residents (including the amazing Cults Croft and incredible Ritva) as well as artists and makers from further afield (big up Laura Spring at Sculpture House Dye Garden, AiAi Studio in Japan and the New Materials Lab, Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht).
The Materials Garden is starting simple and small – cultivating plants that can feed into resident artists and local communities processes. The garden also pushes us, and the folks we work with, to think more about where the materials we use originate and the time, energy and other resources needed to grow and process them. It connects us to the seasons and to the specifics of our local climate and environmental conditions, while learning wider global uses and changes. This, in turn, helps us develop and advocate for the use of local and/or regenerative materials within both our communities and residency programmes and within contemporary sculptural practice more widely.
We are currently harvesting and storing French Marigolds for dying and have already used these in our Summer Kids Holiday Club led by Keng Keng Tang. Our Woad will bloom next year alongside other recent planting including weld, woodruff, rhubarb and dogwood.
We would like to especially thank Ritva, who holds a wealth of plant knowledge and has worked tirelessly, supporting our wider community, to germinate, water, tend and inform this work.
We are excited to see what comes next and how this develops. Just look how much has changed since February 2025 when we started the planning the Materials Garden.
