The Gardeners’ House Penzance starts work on community art project for their new sensory garden

The Gardeners' House Penzance have started working with the community on an art project which will inspire installations for their new sensory garden.

 Artists Jane Darke and Andrew Tebbs will be working with Penzance community groups over the next 12 months on a series of workshops, helping them to create designs inspired by the project’s rich archives.

 Local craftspeople will then be commissioned to recreate these designs in stone, metal and wood that will feature in the sensory garden.

Celebrating the natural environment - as well as keeping a record of the horticulture and botany of West Cornwall stretching back for many years - the Gardeners’ House will see the refurbishment of a dilapidated building in the heart of Morrab Gardens at the centre of Penzance.

Artist Jane Darke said: 'We have begun working with a group of Penzance residents at Richmond House using a variety of materials and techniques. The first workshop included pressing seaweeds and wildflowers and drawing plants from life. The plants were left in the presses for a month and then opened at the following workshop for mounting and framing. These completed works will be included in an exhibition at the completion of the project.

 She added: “Each artist has been given a portfolio to store the drawings and designs made over the next year. These designs will be translated by skilled craft workers for inclusion in the hard landscaping of the new sensory garden, along with some of the original work made in the clay and mosaic workshops to come, all managed by Andrew Tebbs and I.”

Work to clear the existing space of any excess vegetation and to find new homes for some of the plants in other areas of Morrab Gardens has already begun.

The sensory garden, made possible by generous funding from the Tanner Phoenix Trust,will be created between the Gardeners’ House and Pengarth Day Centre. It will give a tranquil safe space where people can reconnect with nature and hopes to enhance the lives of older people, particularly those living with dementia.

Helen Rosevear, lead designer at The Sensory Trust, said: “‘It’s great to see light in the garden space after the clearance work because this is essential to allow the new sensory planting to grow well, and importantly the large lime tree and palms have been kept to be key plants in the new design."

She added: "It’s also wonderful to see the work being created in the community arts sessions run by Jane and Andrew, and it’s fantastic that by working with local artisans these will be woven into the landscape framework of the garden."

Connecting people, planet and place, the Gardeners' House building will become an important centre for the community, helping to improve mental and physical wellbeing. The renovated building will become a home to wellbeing workshops, green community projects and a sensory garden.

The Gardeners’ House project will also create a home for a unique archive of documents, books and illustrations. The ‘collection will be made accessible to the public for the first time and highlights the history of Cornwall's natural heritage – and this fascinating archive will be used throughout the workshops to inspire and become part of a ‘living archive’ created and added to by the community, building an ongoing legacy taking us into the future.

Miki Ashton, Project Coordinator for The Gardeners’ House said: “The sensory garden art project plays such an important role in tying the whole Gardeners’ House project and our objectives together.”

She also said: “It will be a wonderful inclusive space with these collaborative artworks creating a welcoming gateway by telling its story and sparking the curiosity of users and visitors to what they might find inside the building itself. The designs will be imagined and brought to life by the very community that will be using the spaces, making the Gardeners' House feel truly their own from day one”.

 The project will continue throughout the next year – including workshops with St Mary's School and Pendower House, working with clay to produce tiles for the sensory garden walls.

 The Gardeners’ House, a charity based in Penzance, received £2.2 million from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, as well as a grant of £896,000 from the Penzance Town Deal fund to help realise their vision.