Our travelling exhibition began its journey at Storiel Museum and Gallery in Bangor. As the first stop on our list, and the first time that the Garden Escapers project had worked on curating an exhibition, there were plenty of details to work out! 

We drew inspiration for our story from many different historical sources including academic papers, Kew Gardens, and books. Our main source of inspiration was a book called The Wardian Case (2020) by Luke Keogh, a great source of information for exploring the rise in the plant trade and the impacts this had globally. Once our research was complete, it was time to get writing. We condensed our research down to six bilingual interpretation panels, making sure we included plenty of images to highlight interesting parts of the story.  

Finding artefacts proved to be more challenging as many items were either too large or could not be loaned for the duration of our exhibition. And so, we explored the local archives and herbarium at Bangor University for some ideas where we found two herbarium specimens of invasive species and a long list of gardeners from the nearby Penrhyn estate which highlighted the importance of maintaining a garden during the 19^th century. We also commissioned a local woodworker to create a miniature version or a Wardian case which was used to transport plants from around the world! 

In April, it was finally time to set up the exhibition. We began by organising our interpretation panels, artefacts and a short film in the room at Storiel. It was then time to bring in the sculpture, created by Manon Awst, into place (more on that in our next blog)! This sculpture would highlight the connection between human and wilder spaces. 

Once everything was in place, we could finally open the doors on Beyond the Boundary: A Case of Garden Escapers! We kicked things off with a launch event at Storiel where we even held a competition to win a copy of the book of The Wardian Case book. 

The rest of our time at Storiel was spent out and about, getting to know some of the amazing people working on helping nature and having great conversations about managing gardens in a way that benefits wildlife. Since our focus was on history and art, our sessions were quite creative. At David Setter’s watercolour workshop, we explored the exhibition and learnt to look closely at the details of plants to draw out their character and understand them – an important skill for identifying different species! At the HERDS event, families had the opportunity to go on a scavenger hunt around the museum to locate invasive plants and find out more about them. We also held a talk at the local Draig Beats festival at Treborth Botanic Garden. 

Interestingly, we also had a scoping group from Scandinavia come to explore how we’re working to tackle invasive species – they went to see the companion sculpture from our exhibition (based at our Gwaith Powdwr Nature Reserve) and paid Storiel a visit too! It was wonderful to have a chat with them about how we’re all working together towards a shared goal! 

If you want to learn more about Beyond the Boundary, why not read the rest of our blog series, or pay the exhibition a visit?