While the garden’s been open we’ve been collecting your personal recipes and remedies. Here’s a selection of herbal tips and treats that you’ve shared. Thank you! “1tsp turmeric and 2tsp honey mixed together and eaten is the best natural antibiotic for sore throats and colds. Don’t drink or eat anything for an hour after eating [...]
Edibles with medical properties feature in many of the Urban Physic Garden wards, including roots and bulbs like garlic, liquorice, ginger and horseradish; seeds like caraway, coriander and fennel; fruits like wild strawberry and chilli pepper; and flowers like marigold, heartsease, nasturtium, thyme and coriander. There are also delicious things like rosemary, basil, lemongrass, lavender, [...]
Creating the Urban Physic Garden has been a linguistic delight. The garden has introduced us to new words of many syllables that trip up the tongue and ignite the imagination. Welcome to our new vocabulary. With thanks to various herbals and herbalists for the definitions. A is for… Anodyne – a medicine that relieves distressful [...]
Tuesday An afternoon in the Urban Physic Garden. Waiting for a friend and an excuse to drink more coffee. I sit squinting into a laptop, trying to avoid catching my own eye in a surface that’s been made into a mirror by the day’s odd light. The weather is an unpredictable mix of sunshine and [...]
I meet Mala, a medical herbalist from Living Medicine, in the Urban Physic Garden at 1pm and we embark on a ‘herb walk’ around the planted hospital wards. We begin our journey in the respiratory department where meet Rod, a virtual patient whose complaints we’re going to attempt to cure. Rod’s in his late 50s [...]
The Urban Physic Garden is much more than a garden – it’s a meeting place, a performance space and a living classroom of sorts. All kinds of interesting and innovative events have been programmed in and around it, including a series of ‘plants to medicine’ walks led by the entertaining Professor Peter Houghton. I went [...]
The Urban Physic Garden features in the latest issue of the rather lovely Lost in London magazine. Here’s what writer Helen Babbs had to say… Pop-up projects are all the rage in London of late. Full of energy and artistry, temporary interventions can be positive forces for local good and make practical use of spaces [...]
“You can be active with the activists, or sleep in with the sleepers, while you’re waiting for the Great Leap Forward” – Billy Bragg, 1988 A garden built on a soon-to-be-developed piece of land in Southwark might not change the world, but it’s a start. Meanwhile uses like this – interventions that take advantage of [...]
The ethics and benefits of re-using materials and working with surplus are clear - it extends the lifespan of materials, reduces land-fill and saves on the energy required to engineer and manufacture new. Re-using locally sourced materials reduces the embodied energy of a build, which is also good for our carbon footprints. Working with [...]
100 Union Street is a site sandwiched between the street and an elevated railway. This is the third in our series of events and installations on the site – first was the Southwark Lido, second the Urban Orchard and now the Urban Physic Garden. There’s an opportunity for temporary projects to take place while development [...]
