The Turner Prize-winning architecture practice Assemble, together with garden designer Sarah Alun-Jones, have created their first garden: a project that challenges our negative associations with weeds.
Now established at Begbroke Science Park, part of the University of Oxford, The Weed Garden is built with materials sourced locally in the Cotswolds. The walls and furniture are made from grey and cream oolitic limestone (a type of limestone made up of small spheres or ‘ooiliths’ that are stuck together by lime mud]) sourced from Grange Hill Quarry, 28 miles away. Enclosed by a large beech hedge, ‘weeds’ such as linaria, hawksbit, teasel and verbascum reach to the sky, alongside wild grasses.
The focus on weeds is especially apt as, from 1960 to 1985, Begbroke was home to the headquarters of the UK’s Weed Research Organisation – one of the world’s most influential centres of weed science, where weed killers were developed and tested.
