Pollinator Paradise

We were delighted to take part in the 2021iteration of The Gingerbread City at the Museum of Architecture, as the theme of ‘Rewilding the City’ plays an intrinsic part in our design ethos and we have been championing this urban regeneration movement through our talk series for some time now.

‘Gingerbread City 2021 asks how rewilding can be brought into different urban /landscape contexts and asks designers to challenge their own thinking about the realms of possibility in order to embrace and foster a biodiverse and rich landscape within our cities.’

This exhibition gave us the perfect opportunity to showcase our nature inspired designs. We collaborated with Akama Bambu, experts in bamboo architecture based in Ecuador, to create our Pollinators Paradise, a wildflower meadow and community honey production centre set in a converted car parking lot, providing an enormous amount of flowering plants for pollinators to enjoy. The aim of the exhibition and our design was to show how easily unused urban sites can be regenerated and how quickly bio-diveristy and native species can be re-introduced into our urban centres. Our design centred around a scared geometry dome constructed from bamboo, that acts as a gathering place for groups and a processing space for our ‘beekeepers’, the two ends of the meadow house giant beehives connected with an interlocking hexagonal pathway reminiscent of honeycomb structures. The layout draws balance and harmony from natural reproductive design flow and physiological synergy, into the space, further adding a sacred element to the design and layering the concept of nature inspired design wisdom. This design was then fully conceived in gingerbread, fondant, icing and sugar glass for the exhibition itself, a feat of engineering and baking skills.

In order to take the project to its design conclusion and to demonstrate the effectiveness of pollinator patches in real life, we employed the help of the Pollinator Pathmaker system created by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, which shows below how our Pollinators Paradise could be planted.

Below is a list of flowering plants and grasses specified for the Pollinator Paradise, this selection was created with pollinating animals in mind. The plants provide nectar from early spring throughout summer and into the late autumn before dying back in order to to rejuvenate ready for next growing season. The selection below includes herbals like Verbena, Echinacea and Chives, as well as structural spire inflorescences Foxgloves, Speedwells and Iranian wood sage’s, as well as tiny delicate flowers from Beeblossom’s to Madonna lilies.

The plan matches the colours with the plants in the list. The green dots represent grasses to be planted under the flowering plants which lose their leaves quickly and thus prevents weeds from invading that space, but also helps provide shelter for pollinators and animals.

These visualisations show the progression of the meadow through the seasons, from early spring to the fully flowering period of mid summer and then the quieter rejuvenating period over winter.