Our Living Archive – the collection of artefacts relating to the landscape and stories of West Cornwall – has been growing steadily since the Gardeners’ House opened in May 2025. It began with items donated by Melissa Hardie-Budden relating to Cornwall’s natural landscape. After a period of sorting and curating, the collection is now starting to take shape.
With help from a team of dedicated volunteers, our Collections Manager has been working through the existing collection. Together they are deciding what forms part of the archive, what will be kept as reference material, and what no longer fits the Gardeners’ House’s purpose.
We have also been lucky to receive some exciting new gifts. These include photographs and papers from Joe, the current Head Gardener at Morrab Gardens, and a beautiful handwritten PhD study on dyes made from lichens.
Our own activities are adding to the archive too. Our Morrab Memories project contributed oral histories and a wonderful animation. It has also given us a foundation for a growing oral history collection that gathers the stories of people connected with the land in Cornwall.
This new, ongoing project is just beginning: two of our volunteers have completed specialist training and are now preparing to conduct the first interviews. Over time, these recordings will add real richness to the collection, capturing personal views on Cornwall’s landscape and climate, both now and in recent years.
Opening up the archive
All of this is brilliant, but how can the public access the archive?
While sorting and curating the existing collection and new acquisitions, our volunteers have also been cataloguing, researching, digitising and transcribing items.
We use Manage Your Collections, a cataloguing database provided by The National Archives. This means our catalogues can be searched through The National Archives’ Discovery portal, which opens our collections up to a much wider audience. Other local archives use it too, including our neighbours at the Morrab Library.
We are still adding and updating records, but we have started uploading our catalogues. It’s an important and exciting step in making the Living Archive more accessible to researchers.
To browse our collections, visit the Gardeners’ House page on Discovery and click through to browse records.
From the archive to our programme
While this work goes on behind the scenes, our collection continues to inform our programme. Scanning items means we can enlarge images for exhibitions or print them for workshops, after-school clubs and creative activities. We also curate small, temporary exhibitions in our spaces to show off exciting finds that tie in with our monthly themes.
Get in touch
If you’d like to view items from the archive or find out more about this part of the Gardeners’ House, email our Collections Manager at [email protected].
