Together with residents of Coolhaven, TENT launched a front garden project in planters, transforming a bare sidewalk into a vibrant garden full of plants, connections, and collaboration. TENT opened in April in Coolhaven, a quiet neighborhood near the city center. Here, we work not only indoors (TENT IN), but also outdoors (TENT OUT), together with residents and artists. The Pottentuin Community recently celebrated the summer greenery in full bloom, the new garden structures adorning the street, their relaxed way of working, and the encounters with neighbors Vivian, Inge, Moira, Gerard, Eveline, and friends.
Artist Kate Price joined the project at our request. Her practice aligns seamlessly: she uses gardens and plants to explore how people, nature, and the city are interconnected, and how new forms of coexistence can emerge within them.
The new street garden reflects the residents' personal gardening interests and their plant collections, as well as their connections in the city. Wilco and Raymond van de municipal Land Bank/Circular Materials Bank (CMB) soil and compost, Jeroen helped the neighbourhood gardener together with the municipality (Bastiaan and Opzoomermee), and David from the nearby theatre workshop designed wooden structures for the boxes.
Plants from other unique Rotterdam gardens, such as the Groene Oase (Green Oasis) and the Afrikaanderwijk Botanical Garden, have also found their place in the many pots. Slowly, the garden grew along with the street: empty paving stones transformed into green islands, filled with the hum of bees and the chirping of crickets at dusk.
More about Kate Price:
Kate Price is an artist working within the field of the land we live on, the flora that lives on and in it, and the people (such as the garden community) as a network that moves and co-creates our landscapes. Inspired by her childhood on an Australian horticultural farm and her experiences in both individual and collective gardening, her practice explores how garden/horticultural/agricultural practices (and their many fluctuations) can facilitate—or hinder—moments of generative exchange, reciprocity, and relationship-building between diverse beings in our ecologies. Recent projects have focused on composting processes, organic waste transformations, urban community gardens, and industrial tulip cultivation in the Netherlands.
Photography by Silvia Arenas
