Alys Fowler outlines our plans to create a graveyard for dead houseplants as part of this year’s Chelsea Fringe Festival

WE PROPOSE TO make a temporary cemetery for all our lost loves, for our regrets and deepest sorrows, for the houseplants we tried to love but failed.

We have all loved a houseplant at some point. Some of these relationships have been long and fulfilling, across generations even, some have been short flings… some we tried to make last, but failed, and some we wished had ended sooner.

We want to give a resting place for these relationships, to celebrate the good times, to commiserate the darker moments and to allow the spirit of the houseplant to pass on to the next life.

We will build a temporary cemetery at the Idler Academy and anyone can bring along his or her dearly departed (or not) houseplants to lay rest at the cemetery. All we ask is that you attach a short epitaph to the dead houseplant. You may wrote about what brought you together, what separated you; a chance to sum up a life and express genuine feelings, be they celebratory or tragic, about the green things in your life.

At the end of the Fringe we propose to hold a public burial for all these souls where we will lay them to rest in the back garden (or compost heap) so they can fulfill they cycle and turn into new growth. Then we will have a celebratory wake with some gin to send the plants off to their next round.

The idea came about from a front garden that I saw as a teenager in downtown Toronto. The owner put up a sign asking anyone to leave their dead houseplants with an epitaph and he artfully arranged all these pot plants into a strange and very beguiling garden. The epitaphs were often very heartfelt, beautiful tributes to lost plants. Sometimes the plants had been given by ex-boyfriends; some had been donated by parents or inherited by relatives and friends. Together they built up a picture that was both humorous and tragic. We’ve all killed a houseplant at some point either through neglect or too much love.

This temporary garden installation is a celebration of our fraught relationships with the green things we bring into our man made world.

ENDS

The Idler and Alys Fowler’s Plant Cemetery project will take place in May and June. For more information about the Chelsea Fringe Festival, please click here. The festival runs from 16 May to 7 June.

Please deliver your dead houseplants to us from 16 May onwards at 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH, just a few minutes from Royal Oak tube station (one stop from Paddington).

Alys Fowler is the author of The Thrifty Gardener, The Thrifty Forager and Abdundance: How to Store and Preserve Your Garden Produce. Her Twitter name is @AlysFowler.

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