Week 2 - Chelsea Physic Garden Visit

Time: 2019.2.11-2019.2.17

Group: Cheuk Him Tam (Jordy) & Irene (me)

Research before the visit

We met before the visit to talk about the understanding of the brief. I labeled keywords I found important in the brief:

access the living archive of the medicinal plant collection, oldest botanic garden, education for apothecaries, the many ways people can navigate them, finding about plants through the human senses.

We then discussed and concluded the questions and tasks on our first visit on a sheet of paper.

Tasks for the first visit

I suggested that apart from the observations, we could do some interviews to see how people would interact with the plants there. However, Jordy believed that the first visit should only be a general understanding of the garden and we did not have the directions of the interview questions yet. We agreed on each other that we can do some interviews after we had some initial ideas.

We then did some research online to see if there are already answers for our questions. We looked through the official site of the Chelsea Physic Garden and found there was an online shop selling things made from plants in garden. Then it occurred to us that maybe we could use food in daily life to engage people in medical plants. We did some further research on flowering tea, medicine, cream and wrote down the questions.

Visit of Chelsea Physic Garden

According to the tasks listed, we first walked around the garden to have a basic impression. I focused on my sensory experience during the process and took notes on my digital map using iPad. I paid particular attention to sounds and the temperature. Also, maybe because of my background in Architecture, I also noticed on textures I stepped on and the width of the roads. One interesting thing was that the textures in garden were all from nature, like rocks, soil and grass. I was specially impressed by the soft soil in the area beside Embankment Gate, where I felt relieved by not only the soft feeling I got but also the mild sound it made.

Different textures

Surrounded by greenary

I then used the recorder to record the sounds and we collected some elements together for our sensory map.

We also found that there were community kitchen garden inside already, and education house for children as well. The garden had done a lot to engage people and has external programs, but it took us a while to find all these things. We collected some booklets at the receptions/coffee shops and found that there were tour guides as well in each season.

Community kitchen garden

The medical area, however, appeared to be the least crowded. The information standings were mostly text and the navigation there was not clear enough. Most of the plants were still in sleep and there was little visual information about them.

Medical area

Short conversation with Wendy

After a general visit, we summarised our questions again and talked with Wendy (a person from the garden). We asked about the composition of the visitors and found that for most of the visitors, they just lived nearby and came to the garden for relax. The garden was in a relatively rich area, so the ticket fee was not a big problem for them. There were also people coming to observe plants, kids coming to learn about plants. The main aim for the visitors were plant research or simply having fun.

We also raised the questions we wrote previously: "Are there any food made of the plants you grew and do you sell these food?" But she said the plants in the garden were mainly for showing not for eating.

Another thing we found particular was about the garden's history. It has more than 350 years of history and the location has not changed at all. We thought that we could maybe do something related with the history.

Summary of the visit

After the visit, we met in a coffee shop to summarise our findings:

general experience of the garden

• encompassed by greenery: What the garden is different from the Hyde Park is that while visitors are walking on the road, they are encompassed by greenery. Visitors can feel the nature through a zero distance.

• natural and rich textures: There are different kinds of textures and they are all extracted from nature. For one, it gives you changed feelings when you stepped from one area to another. For another, it makes you sink into nature completely while giving you different sounds when you step onto.

• educational-all related to living: There are community kitchen garden and educational house inside the garden.

We then concluded our further steps into two directions:

further directions

• How to show information of the garden (library of the garden/resources/history and stories of the garden) to the visitors? (in a interactive way)

• How to bring the plants out of the garden? (public education/ build relationship in real life...)

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/947334_fc650952d7b7413489f4c64c820db102/1080p/mp4/file.mp4