“Gardening has been hijacked by the middle class.” Grow2Know founder Tayshan Hayden-Smith on democratizing the hobby.
London’s Chelsea Flower Show has been a cultural staple in the city since 1912, where gardening masterpieces, from traditional floral arrangements to striking avant-garde effigies, are displayed in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea to largely upper class attendees, including the Royal Family.
This year, however, gardening non-profit Grow2Know is shaking up the antiquated event via a community garden dedicated to The Mangrove Nine, a group of Black activists (partially influenced by the Black Panthers in the U.S.) who were mistreated by the British police and judicial system after they marched to protect restaurant and community hub The Mangrove from racial discrimination. The garden features a sculpture of a barren mangrove tree, complete with nine roots, each representing a Mangrove Nine member, while drawing attention to the global deforestation of mangroves. A crushed concrete divides the garden, an apt metaphor for the racism, poverty, and violence endemic to 1960’s Notting Hill. The project will be on display from 24th – 28th May at the Chelsea Flower Show, before it will be relocated to another location in Notting Hill.
Grow2Know, co-founded by former footballer Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Danny Clarke, was born in 2017 in the wake of Notting Hill’s Grenfell fire, whereby unsafe cladding led a fire to spread unusually rapidly through an apartment tower block, killing 72 people. As a local Grenfell resident, Tayshan became bothered by a neglected spot in the vicinity of the site, “there was a raised brick bed that was unloved and not looked after. And I just thought, this is not what my community represents. So I just decided to tidy it up a bit, and that then turned into a garden.” Hayden-Smith describes what he does as “guerilla gardening” and has himself become known as “the Grenfell guerrilla gardener.” Unsurprisingly, he has not been contacted by the local Council Kensington and Chelsea—who have been under fire in relation to the Grenfell incident—to either condemn nor encourage his work.
Hayden-Smith is not only working to beautify his local neighborhood, but to transform gardening’s accessibility and public perception. “Gardening in the U.K. has been hijacked by the middle class. There needs to be a completely different approach to making horticulture and gardening more digestible to a wider audience, because at the moment it’s all a bit prim and proper and perfect. And actually it just needs to be a bit rough and ready,” he says, going on to explain how both race and socio-economic background play a role in how we perceive the hobby, comparing it to how young people look up to footballers who look like them.
For Hayden-Smith, the covid-19 pandemic in particular highlighted the importance of outdoor space and the starkly different access people have to it. While the wealthy fanned themselves in their gardens in the summer lockdown of 2020, others were sequestered to their flats despite the heat. As Hayden-Smith puts it, “there are people that are stacked up in blocks on top of each other that have a windowsill. And then you’ve got people with endless wealth who have a backyard, a front garden, a private garden in the park next to them.”
This inequality was what galvanized Hayden-Smith to go knocking on the door (or gate) of the Chelsea Flower Show. He couldn’t compute how “the World Cup of gardening” could be right on his doorstep, yet seemingly untouchable. “Why is this an exclusive elite space for people to come in from outside the area?” he says. So he set to work changing that, “I guess you have a choice. Either you do your own thing independently or you try to disrupt. I see this as a positive disruption.”
Hayden-Smith is acutely-aware that Grow2Know’s involvement will likely serve as a positive marketing tool for the flower show, expanding its middle-aged, middle-class demographic. “In 20 years time, who’s going to the Chelsea Flower Show? London is only getting more and more diverse. How are you going to adapt to that? I was trying to find a middle ground and saying, ‘let’s work together to find a solution so that the surrounding community can benefit from horticulture in the same way that all those people that pay hundreds of pounds [to be involved in the flower show do]. Let’s share a bit.’ If you think about who runs the Chelsea Flower Show, they’re called the Royal Horticultural Society. What society are you creating which closes the door to the local community?” Going forward, Hayden-Smith hopes that Grow2Know will collaborate annually with the flower show, to embed (pun intended) itself in local communities and plant gardens.
Just like the Mangrove restaurant in the 60s/70s, the unfinished Hands Off Mangrove garden is becoming a hub where locals can come together. At a time where our sense of community is dissipating, particularly in Notting Hill (which has been famously gentrified over the last 30 years or so), this communal aspect lies particularly close to Hayden-Smith’s heart. Throughout the process, he has brought together the two remaining living members of the Mangrove Nine, Barbara Beese and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, and the families of those who have passed on. “This puts things in perspective to understand and come to terms with the brutal past of the black British experience…It comes with limitless social value.”
“Let’s open up those gates,” he says, both in reference to the area’s cordoned off private gardens, and gardening itself.
Images courtesy of Grow2Know
