THIS City is a garden
Plant Co-operative is a not-for-profit urban gardening collective formed in the spring of 2021. We specialise in tending often neglected urban city centre spaces, working alongside city developers, the city council, local organisations and charities to transform and manage pockets of wilder space, and create the opportunity to bring the community together through gardening.
From a community ‘Moon Garden’ in the heart of Manchester’s busy Chinatown, to a three-year project transforming a 20-acre city centre development into a thriving community garden at NOMA, Plant Co-operative has developed a blueprint that challenges the common misconception that community gardening has to be rough and ready and at odds with the developer’s and council’s aesthetics. Instead, we showcase the benefits that can be shared by all by taking a different approach – increasing biodiversity, improving social connection and mental health, and ultimately creating a city of gardeners.
We offer paid, part-time apprentice gardening positions, volunteering days, evening gardening clubs, school workshops and much more in between.
We’d like to hear from you:
RHS URBAN SHOW 2024
How can we make our towns & cities greener?
At the RHS Urban Show, you will get the chance to walk through the "Cloudscape" development. Seven gardens co-designed by Cloud Gardener UK to tackle challenges that urban gardeners regularly face. From growing in containers, sun, shade, renting, wind & budget restrictions, this is a bringing together of seven separate stories all intertwined into one.
In collaboration with Cloud Gardener UK, Plant has designed an immersive communal area that serves as a blueprint for how city developers could implement a community garden as part of plans for new and existing developments.
Encouraging developers to move away from lacklustre planting and traditional maintenance contracts in this way provides opportunities to bring people together through gardening and helps strengthen communities, improves mental health and provides new habitats for urban wildlife.
Our garden at the RHS Urban Show 2024 has been created for and with the community, offering a deeper connection to green space in the city and presenting a vision of what the future of our cities could look like.
After the show the garden will be relocated to a local primary school.
