Place-based learning at The Weir Garden

Nell Marton is Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Contemporary Design Crafts team here at Hereford College of Arts. It was great to hear about ‘craft on the outside’, a student project she’s leading at The Weir Garden, a National Trust garden in Herefordshire.

The Weir Garden is a riverside garden which has been changed gradually through the centuries. It has a distinctive 1920’s feel, with particular features like a boathouse, rockery and beautiful Foster and Pearson glasshouse.

With place-based teaching and learning being one of the themes highlighted in the Open University’s Innovating Pedagogies publication for 2019, the partnership with HCA and The National Trust for this project offers students a unique opportunity to go outside, explore the local area, be curious and create inspiring craft in conversation with a particular place.

Students have spent time talking to volunteers, the Senior Gardener and Visitor Experience Managers at The Weir Garden, finding out more about the stories of this unique space, and learning more about working gardens.

Students will create their responses both to particular places and aspects of the garden, in conversation with local stories and ecologies.

Their work will be on display, on site, in place at The Weir Garden between 25^th May and 28^th July.

Image shows an Octagonal Roman Cistern. Throwawayhack [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons