A History of The Wayward Plant Registry
March 2010
Commissioned for the Market Estate Project, London, to salvage the private gardens from a 1960's council estate undergoing demolition, finding homes for a fig tree, a vegetable patch, and other plants left behind as residents are displaced.
January 2010
The developers of an "Art Hotel" received planning permission to build on the site of the Foundry Garden - our guerrilla garden on Old Street. As we start planning its funeral, we ask: could the garden have an afterlife?
Space Makers Agency invited the Wayward Plant Registry to occupy a vacant shopfront in Granville Arcade, a 1930s indoor market in Brixton, for the production of Exxmas Forest - composed of abandoned x-mas trees. The x-mas tree drop-off shop was transformed into a magical forest, and culminated in the planting of more than 20 wayward trees on the grounds of the secondary school, Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton.
RSA Arts & Ecology called us a "small gem" in their Highlights of 2009! :)
November 2009
A Funeral for Flowers (Flowers Never Purchased / Never Served a Purpose) will be held at the Stanley Picker Gallery as part of Writing Exhibitions.
The Wayward Land Trust has been invited to participate in the Black Country Creative Advantage, a 2-year project of the Centre for Art, Design, Research and Experimentation at the University of Wolverhampton and Longhouse/Multistory in West Bromwich.
October 2009
The Graham Foundation in Chicago will be exhibiting our adoption archives as part of the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do in the City.
September 2009
The Wayward Land Trust proposes A Guerrilla Greenbelt for London in
Critical Cities: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists, Myrtle Court Press, as well as a case study of nomadic allotments for the Farming issue of [bracket].
July 2009
The Barbican hosts a pop-up adoption centre in conjunction with the exhibition, Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009.
May 2009
The Wayward Plant Registry interviews Klaus Peter Rippe of the Swiss Ethics Committee on The Dignity of Plants.
November 2008
The Wayward Plant Registry documentation is included in the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With The City at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The Registry works with the CCA to develop a halfway home for the plants of Canadian Snowbirds, seniors who go to Southern, warmer climates during the snowy Canadian winter months. (Unrealized - but we hope to find a host for this project in future winters ...)
October 2008
The Wayward Land Trust leads a tour of guerrilla gardens in London as part of the This is Not a Gateway Festival, bringing together people, living and working in Europe, whose main preoccupation is the city.
May 2008
The Wayward Plant Registry is discussed in On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries. A debate about the value of weeds is broadcast between the author and The Wayward Plant Registry on Do You Hear the Grass Grow? Sonic Horticulture, on Resonance FM.
The Wayward Land Trust is formed, after adopting a neglected patch of land in Old Street, London. Promptly after cleaning the rubbish and introducing wayward plants, a family of garden gnomes move in. One goes missing, and Lost Gnome signs flyer the neighborhood. The gnome has not yet been found.
September 2007
A young woman prepares to move across the country from California to New York. There are many things she leaves behind, and this includes her plants. The Wayward Plant Registry assists in finding these plants homes in conjunction with Cultivated Event at the national conference for the American Society of Landscape Architects in San Francisco.
January 2007
The Wayward Plant Registry is stunned to witness and document an epidemic of abandoned X-mas trees in the rubbish heaps of London, and institute a campaign to decorate these lonely specimens. The Registry meets with a troop of Guerrilla Gardeners, and together they replant Christmas trees with roots in a reclaimed patch of orphaned land.
September 2006
An adoption event is held at Conflux Festival in New York.
August 2006
The Wayward Plant Registry collects unwanted plants from Liz Christy Community Garden (Lower East Side, the oldest community garden in NYC), Floyd Bennett Community Garden (Brooklyn, the largest community garden in NY state, on an old airfield), Clinton Community Garden (Hell's Kitchen), The 6th and B Garden (East Village), The Urban Nutrition Initiative (Philadelphia). A Halfway Home for these wayward plants is kindly provided in the greenhouse of La Plaza Cultural (East Village, the garden started by Gordon Matta Clark).
July 2006
With the guidance of The Institute for Infinitely Small Things and The National Bitter Melon Council, a registry for Wayward Plants is formed.
A wayward cactus is found, tossed violently to the side of the road from a house in Boston. She had nowhere to go, as there are no resources for unwanted plants.