I’m very pleased to be working with Barrack’s Lane Community Garden again, and with The Nature Effect, to implement the new lottery-funded Heritage of Common Plants project. There are several strands to the project, which focuses on the cultural and productive heritage of five common garden and hedgerow plants – Stinging nettle, Mint, Lavender, Dog-rose, and Elder. One of the aims of the project is to create a unique Herbaria for the Garden, collecting the experiences and memories of the garden’s users around these common plants, as well as collecting physical specimens to create herbarium samples. This kicks off on Saturday 19th March with a day programmed around the Nettle – there’ll be soup, fibre-making and nettle tea as well as a host of other early Spring gardening activities and the annual Seed Swap. Later on in the project we’ll be working with a group of unaccompanied young asylum seekers as a part of their support programme, introducing them to some of Oxford’s beautiful plant- related heriatge sites and collections, and working with them in the Community Garden. I’ll post more information as the project develops.

Nettle cloth from Denmark, retrieved from a bog-grave

Illustration from the fairy-tale, The Six Swans, collected by the Brothers Grim. Their sister had to weave six nettle shirts to help break the spell put upon her brothers by their wicked stepmother.