Artwork by Stephanie Wynne, 'Our Growing Place'. Part of LOOK Climate Lab 2026. Image by Rob Battersby Saturday 28 March / 1pm – 5pm / Open Eye Gallery
Join us for a day of talks and activities celebrating gardens, growing and nature! We’ll be discussing right to grow, composting food waste, inclusive gardening, seed saving and queer ecology. There will be stalls and talks (please book your free talk ticket).
Stalls / 1pm – 4pm / drop in, no need to book
Compost Works: Composting in small spaces
Right to Grow campaign
Dr Barry Green a GP, community gardener & forager presents the Right to Grow. A campaign championed by Incredible Edible nationally, and locally through the Liverpool Food Growers Network. The campaign focuses on communities looking after their own green spaces to grow food and biodiverse habitat, improving green infrastructure, reducing food miles and building a new, healthy food economy.
Squash Liverpool: Growing and saving seeds for locally adapted plants with Jackie Swanson
Squash Liverpool is a bold and ambitious, award-winning community organisation, rooted and home-grown on Windsor Street, Liverpool 8. Since 2010 they have developed 3 growing spaces, a community food hub, café and shop. In their gardens they grow plants for and from local saved seeds and have developed the Toxteth Seed Library which holds a large variety of herb, vegetable and flower seeds. Their annual seed saves and shares have grown to attract many growers from over the region.
Come and learn the art of seed saving and how learning theses skills is an act against climate change and the commercial seed industry, and pick up a packet of seeds!
Growing Sudley: Therapeutic Horticulture group
Therapeutic Horticulture group for adults with stroke and brain injury will display information about adaptive and inclusive gardening for disabilities and health conditions.
Andrea Ku: Pennywort Patrol
This stall is centred on the community canoe group who litter pick the Leeds–Liverpool Canal and remove invasive non-native floating pennywort. This plant forms dense mats that choke waterways, block light, reduce oxygen and smother habitat. It’s a classic “bad news” climate-and-disturbance story – until you lift it out of the water and change what happens next. The group reframes pennywort as a problem-to-resource case study: they collect around 10kg each month, then compost it responsibly (sealed transport, no fragment escape) by balancing it with dry “browns” such as cardboard, straw or woodchip. Because pennywort is soft, leafy and nitrogen-rich, it breaks down quickly into dark, crumbly compost. That compost is then used on the raised beds throughout the year – spring top-dressing, summer mulching to hold moisture during heatwaves, autumn soil rebuilding, and winter protection to feed the soil-helping community food growing become more resilient to hotter, drier summers and wetter winters.
The message is simple and hopeful: even things with difficult origins can be turned into something that supports climate-ready food growing and biodiversity.
Talks / 1.30pm – 4.15 / free, booking required
Gardening in public spaces is hugely rewarding but can also be challenging. Community gardeners in our towns and cities put in countless volunteer hours to help make our streets and parks look cleaner and greener. How do we do this? And why do we do it? This is a case study of public realm sites in South Sefton – exploring the urban landscape, our challenges and the joy of street gardening and community collaboration.
Pennywort Patrol is a community canoe group who litter pick the Leeds–Liverpool Canal and remove invasive non-native floating pennywort. This plant forms dense mats that choke waterways, block light, reduce oxygen and smother habitat. The group reframes pennywort as a problem-to-resource case study: they collect around 10kg each month, then compost it responsibly. That compost is then used on the raised beds throughout the year – spring top-dressing, summer mulching to hold moisture during heatwaves, autumn soil rebuilding, and winter protection to feed the soil-helping community food growing become more resilient to hotter, drier summers and wetter winters. The message is simple and hopeful: even things with difficult origins can be turned into something that supports climate-ready food growing and biodiversity.
The environmental sector is often dominated by a single demographic, which can unintentionally create barriers to participation and silence other perspectives. This participatory talk directly addresses that imbalance by describing how to create welcoming, non-hierarchical spaces where people who are often excluded from environmental conversations — working-class communities, disabled people, neurodivergent people, LGBTQ+ communities, and those without formal environmental training — are not only invited in, but actively centred.
Working with land breaks down social barriers, builds trust, and enables genuine discussion in ways that formal meetings often cannot. This activity strengthens environmental engagement by recognising that everyone has knowledge, lived experience, and insight, and that environmental action is more effective when shaped by diverse voices. The outcome is not only improved well-being and connection to land, but a more democratic, representative, and socially just approach to environmental participation.
For this talk, Earth Moves will show clips of their environmental films and lead a participatory discussion on unconscious bias, corporate influence and what people nowadays perceive environmentalism to be.
What is Queer Ecology?
What are Ecosystem Processes?
How can these processes help us as urban gardeners?
How can queering ecology help us to understand these cycles and work with them to subvert the concrete jungle and garden more effectively?
How do our views about nature affect our gardening practices and community spaces?
Using their experiences as queers in the world of ecology and community growing, Sam and Tom will explore these questions through the queer perspective and share how it can be used as a tool to empower all of us to reconnect to our habitats and build resilience wherever we grow.
Garden festival is part of LOOK Climate Lab.
Address:
Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
L3 1BP Liverpool
Open:
10am – 5pm, Tue – Sun
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