Gardening with growbags - and growboots and growprams

What better way to bring life back into our city centres than to dot them with plants, asks Fionola Meredith

FORGET TASTEFUL stone or terracotta planters. How about filling an old roller boot with marigolds or loading an old pram with lobelias? That’s what happened at an unorthodox garden workshop in Belfast on Saturday morning, organised by Place, the Architecture & Built Environment Centre for Northern Ireland.

Anyone who wanted to take part was asked to bring a container that was easy to carry, wheel or pull along. Once those containers were planted up, everyone was invited to take to the streets with their creations and become part of a living, moving garden.

An empty shop on Castle Lane, near Cornmarket – one of a growing number of vacant retail units in the city – was the location for the workshop, itself part of a series of events designed to bring a little fun, colour and excitement to an otherwise unused and rather desolate space.

Amberlea Neely, manager of Place, sees the vacant shops as a form of urban blight, threatening the quality of the city-centre experience. “People will not come into town to walk past rows of empty units, pound shops and charity outlets,” she says. Neely believes that bringing people into Belfast to take part in family-friendly creative activities is a way of countering that blight and enriching the life of the city.

Old wellingtons, a stainless-steel dog dish, an upturned sombrero and an old Starbucks cup were just a few of the random receptacles people brought to the workshop. Although they looked fairly uninspiring while they were waiting to be filled, once the planting got under way they took on lives of their own.

One boy arrived on his bike, which was festooned with hats and panniers ready to be planted up. Another young man came towing a pull-along army support vehicle, soon to be rather incongruously filled with lemon-coloured marigolds and gazanias, while sisters Ellen (16), Charlie (11) and Ramona White (nine) brought a hot-pink backpack and a pair of retro cherry-printed roller boots.

And it wasn’t just an event for children. Sean Baker, a graphic designer, planned to use chunky pottery cups and saucers as makeshift plant pots. His friend Jenny McDonald, an architecture student, was filling an elegant pair of red and navy high-heeled shoes with soil.

Weren’t they a bit too good to stuff with plants? “I got them in a vintage market a while ago, but they were never very comfortable to wear, so I thought this would be a better use for them.”

Janis Steadman, the artist who led the workshop, has form when it comes to making impromptu gardens in unexpected places. “This is all part of my ongoing mobile nature project, bringing colour and life to empty derelict sites in the city,” she says. “It started as part of my degree in fine art and environmental sculpture. I wanted to do something different, bringing together art, nature and ecology. I found that when you make a garden you always get people coming to see what you’re doing, and they often stop for a chat over the fence. It is a kind of performance art, but one that people can relate to.”

Once everyone had stuffed as many flowers and plants as possible into their containers it was time to hit the road.

Steadman set out in front, towing an old pram filled with birch saplings. Everyone else followed, pulling, dragging or cradling their own shamelessly kitsch horticultural creations, to the smiles and stares of passers-by.

The final destination of this ramshackle mystery tour turned out to be a disused police station on Queen Street. Behind its forbidding boarded-up exterior and grim institutional corridors Steadman revealed a surprisingly beautiful secret garden that she had created in the courtyard of the building. Courgettes, cabbages and beetroot were planted in old hostess trolleys and baby buggies, while mirrored tiles on the ground caught the blue of the sky above. And, to the delight of the smaller members of the group– as well as some of the older ones – a blue checked tablecloth in the corner was laden with buns, cherries, strawberries and sweets. It was a delightful end to a July parade with a difference.