The First Front Garden Flax Experiment | Growing Fibre Flax In Derbyshire

A domestic house garden in Derbyshire awash with clay soil and coal | yet the flax still grows

My first attempt at growing flax in my Derbyshire front garden began with a fairly ordinary question. Could I grow enough of this beautiful little plant, in an equally ordinary domestic garden, to begin understanding how it became fibre? At that point, I knew very little. I had started thinking about flax because I wanted to use the fibre in my own creative work and, eventually, in community projects, but before I could think about spinning, weaving or making anything collaboratively, I needed to understand what happened at the very beginning. What did the plant actually need? When should it be harvested? How difficult was it to process? Could somebody like me, with more curiosity than gardening expertise, actually grow it successfully at home?

So I planted it in my front garden. This was not a carefully prepared field or a beautiful allotment. The soil here is heavy Derbyshire clay, and digging into it often brings up bits of building debris from when the estate was constructed and, every so often, pieces of coal, a reminder that this is a former mining community. The previous owners had apparently dealt with the garden mainly by throwing weed killer at it from time to time, so thistles still appeared with great enthusiasm. Into all of that, I poked flax seed.

The Front Garden Before The Flax | Not Exactly Ideal Growing Conditions

The original aims were fairly simple. I wanted to understand the growing, harvesting and processing of flax, and then begin playing with the fibre to see what it might become in my own work and, one day, in collaborative community arts. I had been reassured that flax was quite forgiving and could be sown directly into the ground, which was excellent news for somebody who was not approaching this with the confidence of an experienced gardener. Between rain showers, I made shallow channels in the clay and sowed the seeds. Before long, the channels began to change and tiny green shoots appeared in thin lines across the soil, almost soldier like, standing exactly where I had sown them. I remember the pleasure of seeing them. They looked so delicate, but they had pushed their way up through that difficult ground anyway.

From the beginning, there was something rather lovely about the contrast between the plant and the place. Flax is elegant. The stems are slender, the leaves fine, and when the blue flowers appear they seem almost too fragile to last. Yet here it was growing in heavy clay, amongst thistles, building rubble and the occasional lump of coal, and doing far better than I expected.

Of course, just as I became invested in watching the crop grow, life introduced a rather significant complication, and I had to go to Australia. Suddenly, the flax growing experiment became something else entirely. I was no longer there to fuss over it, check it every day, or intervene whenever something looked uncertain, so other people had to keep an eye on it for me. At the time, I thought of this mainly as a nuisance and an accidental test of how little attention flax could survive on, but looking back, it feels much more interesting than that. The work I make now is often about what happens when something passes from one person to another, when control loosens and when other people become part of the process. I did not have those words for it then. I simply had a front garden full of flax in Derbyshire and was suddenly on the other side of the world.

First Flax Seedlings Emerging From The Derbyshire Clay

The plants carried on without me. By the time I returned, they had become a real presence in the garden, standing yellow green and tall amongst the more familiar cottage garden planting. The thistles were still there too, apparently perfectly happy to live alongside their new flax neighbours. Very little weeding had happened; there had been no feeding, careful thinning or elaborate watering regime, and Mother Nature had provided quite a lot of water by herself. My supposedly controlled experiment had become much closer to real life.

One of the things I was unsure about was how closely together the flax should grow. Like many inexperienced gardeners, I assumed that giving plants more room must automatically be better, but flax grown for fibre is rather different. The plants are usually grown densely, so they compete for light and reach upwards, producing the long, straight stems that are useful when fibre is the aim. I had not known that when I planted mine, and that became one of many moments where the project stopped being about getting everything right and became much more about paying attention to what happened. How tall should the plants become? How much fibre could a small domestic patch possibly produce? Would heavy Derbyshire clay change the quality of the stems? Could this scruffy front garden really produce enough material to make anything useful? Somebody had told me that a square metre of flax might eventually produce enough fibre for something like a tea towel, so naturally I began imagining my future tea towel empire, even though there was still the small matter of learning how to turn an actual plant into linen first.

I have now grown flax here for three seasons. In the first two I simply sowed the seed by hand into fairly dense rows without measuring it. In the third year I measured much more carefully and, interestingly, the crop felt less productive. That does not prove spacing was the reason, because every growing season is different, but it has made me much more interested in how densely fibre flax wants to grow. My current growing guide reflects what I have learned across all three seasons.

The Front Garden Taken Over By Flax | Rather More Successful Than Expected

Harvesting brought another question. If I wanted good fibre, I needed to pull the flax at the right stage, but if I left it longer, the seed heads would mature, and I could collect seed for another crop. I wanted both. That decision turned out to matter more than I realised at the time because saving seed meant the experiment did not need to end with one season or one garden. The plant could move. Seed could be shared. Somebody else could grow it somewhere else. At this stage, though, none of that was planned in any grand way. I was simply trying to understand what this crop was asking me to do next.

When I look back at this first growing experiment now, I can see the beginnings of ideas that have stayed with me. The conditions were imperfect; I was learning as I went; other people had to help; the weather made decisions on my behalf; and the flax grew in soil never designed to support a fibre plot. The project kept changing shape around everything else that was happening in my life. I had started out wanting to understand how to grow flax for fibre, but I was beginning to learn that the interesting part might not be controlling every stage perfectly. It might be what happened when the plant, the place, the people and all the unexpected bits became part of the work too. At the time, I still had no idea where any of this would lead. I just had a front garden full of flax, a growing list of questions and the rather wonderful realisation that the plants had survived me.

That first front garden experiment became the Riddings Community Flax Project, which now brings the growing, local heritage and community strands together in one place.