Introducing: The Comfrey Almanac!
What is The Comfrey Almanac?
The Comfrey Almanac: Growing with the Garden is a collaborative book project and resource developed in partnership between The Comfrey Project and Newcastle University. This book will collate, curate and celebrate the diverse ecological knowledge and experiences of The Comfrey Project volunteers tending their gardens across Tyneside. Designed to accommodate multicultural perspectives on land use and empowerment through shared knowledge, the Almanac is organized into 12 chapters corresponding to each month of the year.
Each chapter includes:
- Stories and poems
- Cultural festivals (e.g., Basant, Ramadan, Nowruz, Eid al-Fitr, Refugee Week, Christmas)
- Gardening and agricultural expertise (e.g., companion planting, ‘scruffination’, vagabond plants, pollination)
- Recipes from home cultures using garden-grown ingredients (such as kovo, amaranth, and mint)
- Natural remedies and herbal teas
- Garden fauna, both present and remembered
The Comfrey Almanac reimagines urban spaces as dynamic, living urban grounds, offering insights into how people who have become refugees or are seeking asylum contribute to community-led ecological urban placemaking. Illustrated with photographs, drawings, and patterns by the volunteers, the Almanac serves as both a legacy project to enhance the visibility of The Comfrey Project and an educational tool grounded in diverse practical experiences.
Who is it for?
This book is created by and for the volunteers and staff of The Comfrey Project. It will provide a lasting structure to document and share the diverse knowledges, experiences, and relationships cultivated at The Comfrey Project since its establishment in 2002. The tangible artifact of The Comfrey Almanac seeks to amplify the volunteers’ voices, enrich educational literature, and build our community’s collective capacity to address social equity and environmental sustainability creatively and effectively.
What are we doing next?
From June to August 2024, a series of artist-led workshops will engage the volunteers to produce an array of textual and visual content for The Comfrey Almanac. These workshops will encourage creativity, collective discovery, and personal expression. Artist and designer Ronan Devlin will lead participants in crafting garden-inspired patterns through foraging, photography, embroidery, and drawing. Experimental photographer Dominic Smith will guide the creation of Anthotype illustrations, using sunlight to imprint organic materials and plant pigments onto photographic paper. Writer Ruth Brickland will work with both adults and children to develop narratives through conversation and creative writing, resulting in anecdotal and observational texts. As summer transitions to autumn, the images, objects, and texts produced during these workshops will be compiled to serve as the main illustrations for the Almanac. These elements will be interwoven with each monthly section, establishing The Comfrey Project volunteers as co-authors. The final content will undergo
review and refinement in collaborative sessions throughout September, October, and November. By the end of 2024, the Almanac’s design and layout will be organized into twelve monthly sections, capturing the garden’s seasonal transformations and the volunteers’ evolving engagement. This process will integrate photographs, documentation, co-creative mapping, and poetry from the 2024 workshops and from previous sessions. In January 2025, Gillian and The Comfrey Project will review the final proofs before sending the manuscript to print. The book will be launched in late February 2025 at The Comfrey Project. In the following months, we will organize a symposium at The Farrell Centre in Newcastle city centre to take place in June 2025. The symposium will bring together volunteers and staff from The Comfrey Project, academics, stakeholders, and community garden and food growing initiatives to discuss and expand upon the participatory action and creative approach that has made The Comfrey Almanac project a transformative endeavour.
Who helped?
This project is made possible by the generous support of individual donors, Newcastle University, and the North East Combined Authority.
Special thanks to the crowdfunding contributors: Penny Schofield, Rachael Brien, Jeremy Hofmeister Mac Lynn, Heart & Parcel, Ashley Shield, Lily Kroese, Alison Bray, Mary McGrory, Ailsa Rutter OBE, Helen Raffle, Conor Clarke, and Peter Jackson.
At Newcastle University, we thank the NU Humanities Research Institute, the Centre for Researching Cities, and the Economic and Social Research Council funding team. We also thank the North East Combined Authority for their enthusiastic support.
Why does it matter?
This creative collaboration opens new avenues to valorize and make visible the experiences of people in the contexts of mass migration and climate change adaptation. Urban gardening and horticultural practices are vital for supporting refugees and people seeking asylum, but current research often overlooks the natural environment’s role in migrants’ lives and adaptation. While there is growing awareness around the importance of diverse land knowledges, studies focusing on displaced people’s sense of place in host countries remain scarce. A creative collaboration, The Comfrey Almanac provides a shared foundation to understand the complexities of ‘uprooted belonging’ and the role of gardens for refugees and asylum seekers in asserting their right to homemaking. Moreover, it is hoped that this book will catalyze community-led practices to inform applied and transformative urban agendas.
How did the project come about?
The Comfrey Almanac emerged through lots of conversations between the academic, staff and volunteers and the concept was finally conceived by The Comfrey Project’s coordinator, Nicola Bushell, and Dr Gillian Jein, a cultural geographer based in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University. The materials for the Almanac are being collated from a series of workshops, activities, archival research, and documentation. Gillian has been involved with The Comfrey Project since 2021, organizing events like ‘SeasonsPace’ at Airfield Urban Farm in Dublin and the ‘Sowing Stories’ workshop with local artist Sara Cooper in July 2022. From January to July 2023, she undertook a Knowledge Exchange Sabbatical at The Comfrey Project, funded by Newcastle University. The thematic threads of the Almanac developed from enriched conversations, listening, and co-working during this time, and it was Nicola’s Eureka moment: ‘Let’s do an Almanac!’ that gave the project its shape. Over Gillian’s time spent at The Comfrey Project, the volunteers have revealed the garden as a sanctuary, providing relief from everyday stress and political pressures. Gardening activities help build social capital and a sense of worth and empowerment through bonding, bridging, and shared decision-making. These shared insights have shaped the Almanac’s rationale, motivation, aesthetic, and formal construction.