Over the coming year, the Gardeners’ House is hosting a series of creative workshops with Sustainable Penzance, each exploring a different way of thinking about our town, its landscape and its future.
Gardeners’ House and Sustainable Penzance are connected by a shared love of the world around us. Gardeners’ House celebrates it our landscape, bringing people together and holding the stories that connect them to this place, while Sustainable Penzance focuses on protecting the environment and building community resilience for the future.
Here’s what’s coming up in our programme of joint workshops:
Lyonesse
Friday 9 October 2026, 10.30am-12.30pm, Gardeners’ House
An interactive workshop where we dive deep into the drowned past to reimagine our shared future. Focusing on local community and the threat of rising sea levels, how will we become resilient?
Together, we’ll explore the myth and mystery of Lyonesse and other lost lands, discover the hidden layers beneath our surrounding waters, from submerged forests to flint-filled valleys, and invent new mythologies and tools for survival: will we become merfolk? Ride underwater trains? Build floating towns?
This is a space for serious play and creative resilience, drawing on folklore, community memory, environmental change and collective dreaming.
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Poems for Penzance
20 November 2026 and 14 May 2027, 10am-12pm, Gardeners’ House
What do you love about Penzance? What would you change? What are you excited about, worried about or hopeful for?
Poems for Penzance is a creative, multi-generational project inviting people to explore their relationship with Penzance through words, drawing and making. In this one-off creative workshop at Gardeners’ House, we’ll explore different ways of writing about place, using Penzance as our inspiration. We’ll think about the town as it is now, what it means to us, and what we hope for its future.
We’ll start by introducing Sustainable Penzance and Gardeners’ House, and thinking about the Living Archive and the stories, ideas and creative work that it holds. We’ll then explore poetry in a broad sense, looking at different kinds of poems, illustrated books and creative work for inspiration. Through playful word games, prompts and conversation, we’ll begin creating our own short pieces of writing about Penzance.
You might find yourself thinking about:
- If you could change one thing about Penzance, what would it be?
- What makes you excited about the future of the town?
- What are you concerned about?
- What places, people or landmarks are important to you?
- What words rhyme with the names of places around Penzance?
- What do you hope Penzance will be like in the future?
There are no rules about what a poem has to be — it could be a few lines, a list of words, a drawing with text, a rhyme, a reflection or something completely unexpected. Once you’ve created your piece, we’ll turn it into a beautiful, individual page using drawing, illustration and creative making. You’ll also have the opportunity to add a pressed flower, drawing or other small piece inspired by Penzance.
This workshop is open to anyone who is curious about Penzance, words, creativity and place. You don’t need to be a writer or an artist, and you don’t need any previous experience with poetry. Just bring your ideas and your thoughts about Penzance. Come along, have a play with words, and help us create Poems for Penzance.
Book your place on Eventbrite – November
Book your place on Eventbrite – May
Becoming part of the Living Archive
The finished work will become part of Poems for Penzance, a growing collection of creative responses to the town. The project takes inspiration from books and poetry already held in the living archive at Gardeners’ House, bringing together historic and contemporary voices to create a snapshot of Penzance today. The hope is to create something that captures the feelings, ideas and hopes people have for the town, and leaves something behind for future generations to discover in the growing archive at the Gardeners’ House
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Map Making: Greenways Workshop
23 January 2027, 10am-12pm, Gardeners’ House
Join us to create your own personalised walking maps of Penzance. Make your own map of local PZ Greenways! Join us to find out more about the network of paths and green spaces that connect in, around and out of town. Then make your own PZ Greenways map for the journeys you’d like to make from where you live, or other places in town.
All materials are provided. Just bring yourself and a refillable water bottle. You can find out more about PZ Greenways on the Sustainable Penzance website. We look forward to seeing you!
The maps from this workshop will be scanned and digital copies kept in the Living Archive.
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Rebel Botany x Flowers of the Field
16 April 2027, 10am-12pm
Join Sustainable Penzance for Rebel Botany, a slow, curious wander through the back streets of Penzance, where cracks in the concrete and forgotten corners become sites of quiet discovery. Armed with chalk and a shared sense of wonder, we’ll mark the wild plants and resilient weeds that thrive in the margins, highlighting the beauty of what’s so often ignored.
Guided by Flowers of the Field by C. A. Johns, a treasured text from the Gardeners’ House archive, we’ll learn to identify the plants we encounter, connecting past knowledge with present-day streets. This is part walking tour, part collective mapping, part gentle act of rebellion.
Expect to look closer, move slower, and leave with a new appreciation for the unnoticed ecosystems of the everyday.
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Power to Change
Private workshops with community groups: September, December, March and June
A workshop for women and girls where we look back at the female characters in the Gardeners’ House archive and how they are activists. What qualities do they have, how do those qualities make them an activist, and how do those qualities show up in ourselves? We finish the workshop making a postcard with one of the qualities that we would like to remind ourselves of and keep close.
Please contact Sustainable Penzance on info@sustainablepz.co.uk if you would like to know more about booking workshops with them.
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All of these workshops draw on the stories, ideas and artefacts in the living archive at Gardeners’ House, bringing together historic and contemporary voices to build a living picture of Penzance today.
Whether you come along for one session or several, you’ll be adding your own voice to that collection, for others to discover in years to come.
Keep an eye on the Gardeners’ House website and the Sustainable Penzance website for booking details and any new dates added to the programme.