Our garden is open to everyone to enjoy and play a part in.
Volunteers wishing to help in the garden are welcome on a Wednesday and Thursday between 10am – 4pm, with Wednesdays 10am – 1pm being the most popular time for our volunteer team to meet with our Associate Artist & Gardener, Jevan Watkins Jones. Together the team learn new gardening skills and feel part of the garden’s vision for biodiversity.
At other times we also invite groups and individuals to take part in garden activity and fun creative sessions. We welcome people of all ages into our garden: adults with learning disabilities, older people, aslyum seekers and refugees, families, children and young people. To find out more please get in touch with at info@theartstation.uk or on 07927770421
Our Garden offers the opportunity to connect with nature. We welcome everyone of all ages and abilities to engage in discovering how to support our local biodiversity and protect vital habitats for our wildlife. We use our garden as a green hub for learning and creativity, and developing a sense of place informed by our walks and trips out into the wider environment and Suffolk landscape.
We collaborate with schools, families, local groups, youth reparation services, asylum seekers and refugees, adults with learning difficulties, artists and environmental experts and others to share knowledge and enjoyment and to create a model for best practice around creative engagement with our environment.
Our garden is open to everyone to enjoy and play a part in.
‘…awareness of the sensuous existence of other life-forms doesn’t have to involve big ideas or actions. How about about just visiting your local
garden…to smell the plants?’Timothy Morton – All Art is Ecological, Penguin Books – ‘Green Ideas’ series, (volume 3)
We see the garden as place of creative engagement and learning at all levels. A fully accessible green space to be enjoyed in the heart of Saxmundham, working with many individuals and groups from the town and local area. The Art Station’s wishes to nurture a range of social and ecological habitats and with that, a growing biodiversity.
Volunteers wishing to help in the garden are welcome on a Wednesday and Thursday between 10am – 4pm, with Wednesdays 10am – 1pm being the most popular time for our volunteer team to meet with our Associate Artist & Gardener, Jevan Watkins Jones. Together the team learn new gardening skills and feel part of the garden’s vision for biodiversity.
At other times we also invite groups and individuals to take part in garden activity and fun creative sessions. We welcome people of all ages into our garden: adults with learning disabilities, older people, asylum seekers and refugees, families, children and young people.
If you would like to become a volunteer please get in touch with us at info@theartstation.uk or on 07927770421
Late February and a carpet of snowdrops stretches out from under the horse chesnut tree, filling one quarter of our community garden. We’re stepping into a new gardening year with a desire to innovate within the realm of art and ecology. Behind the horse chestnut runs the River Fromus and beyond it a water meadow that our garden looks on to. Diametrically opposite
to the horse chesnut is a majestic copper beech, C1860. Between them, the now shaggy lawn and sixteen newly planted heritage fruit trees. One side, a deep south-facing herbaceous border for sun loving plants and on the other, a north-facing border for shade loving plants.
The garden was renovated four years ago by a small team of volunteers, laying it out as a traditional Victorian walled garden with a formal lawn and ornamental borders. Up until that point garden had been neglected and become overgrown with brambles and nettles, during the time that the adjoining building had been a working bank from the 1960s to 2014.
In 2024 The Art Station began to work artist and gardener Jevan Watkins Jones for our R&D phase of this new chapter to explore and support changes in the garden and to galvanise volunteers to help. Jevan has been supported by founder gardener and volunteer, Roger Hedley Lewis, a retired Planning Officer.
The formal lawn, previously mown, was allowed to grow to its full extent and the plant species that already existed surveyed. Local botanist and volunteer, Katie Carr-Tansley has so far recorded 40 wild plant species in her initial survey of the garden. Leaving the grass to grow signalled an ecological and cultural shift in the garden’s development. Long grass provides a cooling element to the garden, protecting a wider area from the increasingly hot and dry summers. This, for the garden, along with newly planted hedge lines, undisturbed thickets with under-storeys of vital ‘weeds’ provide a cooler refuge for small mammals, amphibians (toads and newts), reptiles (slow worms) as well as a myriad of invertebrates including the thick-legged beetle we spotted, the elephant hawk moth (pictured) and a good number of the UK’s 30 earthworm species we’re seeing as we compost.
Because we let our grass grow, keep dense borders, allow scrub areas to exist and trees to thrive we also help provide food and shelter for many birds including blue tits, robins and blackbirds that will feed on moth caterpillars, as well as wrens that will perch on the long grass and dip down to find spiders and insects on the ground, where they have cover among the thatch. Over on the other side of our field gate are a group of standard cotoneaster trees, planted in a municipal space called Fromus Square. In recent years these have attracted hundreds of overwintering Bohemian waxwings from Scandinavia and Russia, that stock up on the abundant berries before roosting in our Majestic cooper beech tree.
The vision for the garden is to increase its biodiversity so that it contributes to the green infrastructure of the Fromus Valley. We are achieving this, step-by-step, in collaboration with our diverse communities whilst offering a restorative green space to be in and engage with for wellbeing. As present custodian of the garden, The Art Station aims to engender a sense of place through re-coupling people and nature, and to improve this tiny section of the Fromus Valley for future generations of people, animals and plants to benefit from.