The Herbert’s
Community Garden

Inheriting A Garden Already In Motion

I inherited the Herbert's Community Garden when a colleague moved on, so this was never a project with a clean beginning for me. The museum had an underused courtyard on the Jordan Well side of the building, with an existing sculpture, mature planting and a lot of potential, but there were still practical questions about what the garden should become, who it was for and how it might be looked after. At the same time, Coventry was developing a wider network of community green spaces. The West Midlands Combined Authority Community Green Grants programme supported a three site project through Feeding Coventry, linking the Herbert with Foleshill Community Centre and Kairos. The Herbert was one part of that wider picture rather than an isolated garden scheme.

What interested me most was the idea that this could be a useful garden rather than simply a prettier museum courtyard. There were people living within walking distance of the Herbert who had no garden of their own, so the conversation included how this space might give people somewhere to sit, grow, meet and feel that they had some ownership. I started bringing together the relationships, practical knowledge and creative activity that could help turn a partly formed idea into something people might actually use.

Going Out Before Asking People In

The relationship with Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre became one of the central strands. I did not want to begin by asking people who might not already feel comfortable in a museum to simply come through the Herbert's doors. I went out to the centre first and worked through a run of nature and heritage activities that could begin with familiar things: planting seeds, looking closely at flowers and leaves, making food for birds, painting, cooking and dyeing fabric with red cabbage.

Growing at home was part of that thinking too. If somebody did not have a garden, a windowsill still offered somewhere to begin. We reused bottles, jars and everyday containers for planting rather than making access depend on buying specialist equipment. With every activity I wrote simple instructions so people could repeat it afterwards without needing me to be there. The aim was not only to fill a workshop slot. I wanted people to leave knowing how to do something again for themselves.

The sessions also became more reciprocal as people brought their own knowledge into the programme. One cooking session was led by a participant rather than by me or another invited artist. That mattered because the relationship was not supposed to be the museum teaching people how to take part. Food, skills, memories and knowledge could move in both directions, and that changed the feeling of the work.

Food, Plants & Belonging

Part of helping people feel more connected to Coventry was getting to know the city itself. The Herbert wanted to develop a better relationship with neighbouring St Mary's Guildhall, so I went in looking for overlaps between what each organisation could offer. I later took the refugee and migrant group there to explore food, spices, trade and what people in Coventry had eaten and grown at different times. It meant the visit could do two things at once: help people discover more about the place where they were living and strengthen a relationship between two neighbouring heritage organisations.

I was doing the same sort of outward looking research with gardens. I visited Coventry Cathedral and other community growing spaces, and at The Weaver's House I learned more about woad and Coventry's long textile and dyeing history. That connection mattered to me because the garden was never separate from my textile practice. Plants could lead into colour, cloth and local industry just as easily as they could lead into food or wildlife. Coventry Blue began to surface again through that route.

Building A Network Around The Garden

I put together a steering group of people who had a reason to care about the garden and could bring different knowledge to it. Relationships around the table included Grapevine, Coventry University, Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre, faith and community partners and people involved in growing across the city. The meetings were not just administration. They were where we could ask what the garden should be, who might use it, what could be grown and how it might continue after the first season.

Some of those relationships had roots in earlier projects. Coventry Central Hall had become the permanent home for much of The Coventry Banner. While that relationship was developing, people at the Methodist venue showed me the planter outside their building that they also wanted to bring back into use. The banner relationship therefore resurfaced through growing rather than ending when the exhibition came down. That is typical of how my work developed in Coventry: a relationship would begin in one project, disappear for a while and then send up another shoot somewhere else.

The wider green space network also took me into Foleshill and Feeding Coventry. I visited the community garden there, took part in conversations about how green spaces could work locally and worked alongside artists moving through that network. Katie O was one of those connections. I remember joining a community consultation around a mural with plants and medicinal herbs, and Katie later ran a mural workshop at the Herbert. Boards made through that activity were displayed in the garden for a time, so the space was becoming somewhere for community artwork as well as planting.

Learning From Community Growers

A particularly important collaborator was Esther Kovacs from Team Springboard CIC. Esther brought practical community gardening knowledge that I did not have. I visited the community allotment she worked with and another garden she had developed, looking at how people moved through the spaces, what made them usable and how they were cared for. I did not want the Herbert to behave as though it had invented community gardening. There was already a great deal of experience in Coventry, and part of my job was finding it and bringing the right people together.

Esther's knowledge fed directly into the practical development of the Herbert garden. The planters were built collaboratively with support from her network, her wood supplier, volunteers and people including Men's Shed. I was working alongside people during the build, filling beds and planting rather than standing at a distance and managing it. That practical work helped the garden feel made with people from the beginning rather than like a finished museum scheme that communities were invited into afterwards.

Coventry Blue, Woad & Water

Coventry Blue became another thread running through the garden. I had already used tile painting with children and families at Tile Hill Library, so painting directly onto tiles was a participatory process I knew could work with people of different ages and confidence levels. At the Herbert I adapted that idea around Coventry Blue, working with different Coventry groups to create blue and white botanical tiles and then physically testing how they might sit against the timber planters.

The plan was bigger than a set of individual tiles. We began exploring a future mosaic treatment for the planter surfaces with a local mosaic artist, using a flowing water based design. The Herbert stands on Jordan Well, a street whose name preserves the memory of a medieval well associated with Jordan de Shepey, while Coventry's River Sherbourne is another water story that is largely hidden beneath the modern city centre. I have always been interested in the histories and stories held by a place, even when they are not immediately visible, so water, Coventry Blue, plants and the garden began to fold into one another.

I am careful now not to claim that the medieval well sat directly beneath the Herbert because I have not found evidence for that. What we can say is that the museum sits on Jordan Well and that water was part of the place story we were drawing from. That distinction matters to me because the history is interesting enough without making it tidier than the evidence allows.

Building & Planting Together

Once the raised beds were in place, the garden began to move from plans and meetings into an actual growing space. We filled and planted the beds for their first season and began thinking about what the planting itself could say. Food, wildlife and wellbeing all mattered, but so did heritage. Woad and heritage seed ideas connected the garden back to Coventry's weaving and dyeing history, while the practical reality of watering, maintenance and who would keep coming back mattered just as much.

The Herbert later described the garden publicly as a collaborative effort involving community groups across the city. Its own Community Garden account records links with Coventry Urban Eden, Crisis, Warwickshire Wildlife Trust, Foleshill Community Centre, Kairos, Grapevine, Coventry University and St Mary's Guildhall, as well as plans for woad and heritage planting. Seeing that network written down later is useful because no single workshop photograph can show how many relationships sat behind the finished beds.

Art, Reuse & Independence

Creative activity gave people different ways into the garden. There were painting sessions based on plants, natural dyeing, seed planting, bird feeding activities, cooking, tiles, mosaic trials and mural work. I often invited other artists in when their knowledge could take an idea further. My role was not to be the expert in everything. It was to notice where another person could add something useful and make the connection.

Reuse was built into the same approach. Everyday containers became planters, materials were borrowed or adapted and activities were designed so they could be repeated without needing expensive specialist supplies. That resourcefulness had already been developing through my Herbert projects and later became a more conscious part of the sustainability approach described in my manifesto. In the garden it was practical, social and environmental at the same time: if somebody could repeat an activity at home with what they already had, the project travelled further than the session itself.

A Garden That Kept Growing

I was already thinking about continuation before my own involvement ended. I explored whether Coventry University students next door might help care for the beds and began conversations with the Heritage Seed Library about future possibilities. Not every idea had time to develop while I was still at the Herbert, but the intention was to leave relationships and practical routes that could carry on rather than treat a launch as the end of the project.

That continuation did happen in ways that belonged to the people who came afterwards. Coventry Urban Eden records further planting at the Herbert in 2023 and 2024 with Team Springboard and Mothers Who Make. Later Herbert reporting also shows the beds established and describes further Coventry Blue tile work. I do not claim those later stages as mine, but I value the fact that the garden did not stop when my own phase finished. A community garden should be able to outlive the person who happened to coordinate one part of it.

Roots & Shoots

When I first took the job at the Herbert I had never lived in Coventry, knew nobody there and had only visited the museum once. By the time of the Community Garden, I was moving between community centres, gardens, artists, growers, the university, faith organisations, refugee and migrant communities and neighbouring heritage sites. That network had grown through earlier work including my Turner Prize 2021 community engagement and The Coventry Banner, and then kept spreading into the garden.

Looking back, this project is one of the clearest examples of why I struggle to describe my practice as a sequence of separate projects. The relationships behave more like mycelium. Tile painting from Tile Hill resurfaced as Coventry Blue. A banner relationship at Central Hall became a conversation about a planter. A visit to The Weaver's House brought woad into the garden and later plant fibres, natural colour and growing became increasingly important in my own work. People, materials, places and stories keep crossing the boundaries we put around project titles.

The Herbert's Community Garden brought those strands together in one small piece of city ground: growing, local history, textile heritage, food, migration, wildlife, reuse, art and the question of who gets to feel that a cultural place belongs to them. My own phase finished, but the garden and many of the relationships continued. That feels like the right ending for a project that never really had a clean beginning either.