Introduction

About the MA Food Studies module, Gardening, Community and Wellbeing

Gardening, Community, and Wellbeing is a module offered on MA Food Studies. It aims to introduce students to the wider context of gardens and community garden projects, and gardens as places of food production and wellbeing. Students learn the principles of contemporary horticulture through their practical sessions at the Community Garden on campus and explore the academic content through guided seminars, and presentations from visiting experts and practitioners.

Working alongside members of the community garden, knowledge and skills are shared transgenerational learning, for example, analysing the structure of soil, pruning, and managing a mixed orchard, building a ‘dead hedge,’ and developing a sustainable composting system. Two areas of the garden are currently being developed as wildlife areas to increase the biodiversity of the garden, and throughout their time in the garden students are encouraged to explore the concepts of commensality and wellbeing, and to consider the potential health benefits of engagement with nature.

Creative Projects

The module is assessed by the completion a reflective journal, and a creative project. The reflective writing is presented in the form of a weekly record and reflection of activities in the garden whether, season, a gardening activity, or the observations of planting seeds, bulbs, and tubers.

In this online exhibition, you will see a selection of outputs from the students' creative projects.

Garden of Life

by Muntaha Hasnath

Year 5 - Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (BMBS) programme

The garden held me, when the hospital couldn’t.

When my sister was unwell, I often found myself in the hospital garden, searching for a place where fear could loosen its grip. Among the flowers and greenery, I discovered not just distraction, but comfort, a reminder that even in uncertainty, life continues to grow. That experience anchored me, shaping the person and future doctor I am becoming.

This project, Garden of Life, is my attempt to capture that feeling. I chose embroidery because it is slow and deliberate, much like patient care. Every stitch is fragile on its own, yet together they form something whole. The design is an embroidered clock, because time is always present in medicine: it dictates diagnoses and recovery but also heals and renews.

The seasons on the clock: sunflower, tulip, poppy, and pansy all mirror life’s cycles of birth, change, loss, and renewal. The maze at the centre reflects the complexity of illness, where each pathway leads somewhere uncertain. And yet, like in healthcare, every journey has meaning.

The process brought challenges. Embroidery is painstakingly slow, and it took over six months and more than three kilometres of thread. At times I felt frustrated by mistakes or by how long it took for the bigger picture to emerge. Yet these struggles mirrored medicine, where progress is often invisible until you step back. The act of stitching taught me patience, resilience, and the humility of knowing not everything can be rushed.

At the same time, this creative work gave me freedom I had not known in medical school. In lectures and placements, there is little space for uncertainty; answers are often right or wrong. But in the garden and in embroidery, I found freedom to pause, to process, and to create something uniquely mine. This freedom reminded me that medicine must allow space for reflection as well as precision.

Community gardens, like St Sidwell’s in Exeter, reinforced these reflections. Visiting during my Medical Humanities placement, I saw how such spaces offer belonging, purpose, and hope. Volunteers spoke of gardening as therapy, as something that held them through difficult times. Their words echoed my own experience and reminded me that health is not only about medicine, but about connection, to people, to nature, to meaning.

This clock will always tick. For me, it is a reminder that good medicine takes time, care, and heart. It also anchors me in the values I want to carry forward into my career: patience, presence, and the courage to walk with people through uncertainty.

I would like to acknowledge St Sidwell’s Community Garden and its volunteers for inspiring this work, and I am grateful for their generosity. Finally, my sincere thanks to Paul Cleave for this opportunity to share my project and for creating a space where art, medicine, and community can come together.

Muntaha Hasnath

Food in Exeter!

by Ziyang Lin

For this creative project, I developed the Exeter Food Map—a visual guide to the city’s diverse network of food-growing and learning spaces. The idea grew directly out of my experiences in the Gardening, Wellbeing, and Community module. Each session was full of hands-on learning and inspiring visits: we planted potatoes in a community garden, examined polytunnels and greenhouses, explored the archaeology field’s hedge-laying, and even admired rooftop beehives. Yet after each visit, I noticed a persistent problem: the knowledge and opportunities we gained were rich but disconnected, scattered across my notes and quickly fading from daily awareness. I kept asking myself, “How can others—especially newcomers—find their way into Exeter’s food-growing community without stumbling across it by luck?”

That question inspired my project’s core aim: to build clearer pathways to these spaces, making their benefits and lessons visible to all. At first, I struggled with how to organise the information. My earlier attempt at a “Good Food” project in St Thomas left me frustrated by how subjective and vague the term “good food” could be. After several drafts and much reflection, I settled on six key categories for the map: community growing spaces, food community organisations, food education spaces, food security organisations, local food producers, and food markets. This structure gave me a comprehensive yet focused way to highlight each place’s unique contribution, from hands-on learning to social connection and food justice.

The map itself is meant to encourage “Chance Trips” - serendipitous, self-guided explorations rather than rigid tours. I envision users discovering where they can learn new skills, join a harvest, or participate in a community meal. In the future, I hope to develop the map into an interactive digital platform where future students and residents can contribute, keeping it up to date and expanding its reach. There’s also potential to adapt this model to other cities, including my hometown in China, where urban agriculture is vibrant but rarely mapped.

Working on this project fundamentally changed me: it made me see how information, when properly organised and shared, can transform isolated efforts into a supportive network. It also reminded me of the importance of collective learning and the role of creative projects in building community. Seeing classmates’ projects after my presentation sparked even more ideas—proving that this process of mapping, connecting, and reflecting is ongoing, not just for me, but for Exeter’s food landscape as a whole.

Download a copy of the Good Food in Exeter Map here.

Tools of the trade: The exploration, evolution and dependability on garden tools for establishing a garden community.

by Amy Blakemore

When choosing a focus for my creative project I was inspired by my own gardening experience, spending my time volunteering at the Exeter Community Garden I wanted to encompass and draw from the weekly sessions I attended and landed upon garden tools due to the integral ability they provide for people to garden in the first place. Garden tools are at the heart of all we do at the community gardenwhether that be pruning the grape vine, constructing the raised beds or sowing seeds, garden tools allow communities to come together, environments to thrive and offer insight into the historic garden practices of the past.

In order to develop a more specific focus for this creative project I landed upon the evolution of garden tools over time, from there, I decided to create a trug. The trug was fascinating to me due to its extensive history dating back to the popularisation of Thomas Smith’s Sussex trug in the 1800s and the skills involved in creating such a tool as referenced in Dorothy Hartley ‘Made in England’ book which looked at the regionality of garden tools. The traditional and regional aspects of trug making are often lost and replaced with ‘modern’ methods today therefore, while making my own trug I wanted to incorporate certain traditional elements of a trug such as the material and shape while also being aware of the ‘modern’ practices and techniques involved in order for the trug to be constructed.

Embarking on this project allowed me to develop and learn new skills while also highlighting themes from the module. Such themes that were present throughout my project were, sustainability, community and gardening. In order to showcase sustainability, I used wood from previous projects when making my trug so that excess materials can be repurposed and given a new life.

The images below show stages of construction of the trug.

Overall, I wanted my creative project to emphasise the importance of garden tools in order to highlight the history and craftmanship involved in creating them. Learning about the history of garden tools and in particular the trug was very intriguing, and I hope my passion for this topic can be seen through the construction of my trug.

Thank you to Paul Cleave, Exeter Community Garden volunteers and my student peers for all the support you have shown throughout this creative project, your insight has been incredibly valued and appreciated throughout this project.

Amy Blakemore

Writing on the Weeds

by Kate Paterson

My ideas for this project initially revolved around the traditional uses of plants in the community garden and their associated folklore. This was in part, due to my chosen academic disciples of archaeology and anthropology, and also as inspired by several guest speakers within the module of ‘Gardening, Community and Wellbeing’. The most notable guest speaker for me was Anne Stobart who is a practising medicinal herbalist and has worked on several initiatives to research and educate on medicinal herbs throughout history. After drafting several ‘fact files’ of plants around the garden and their traditional uses, such as hazel and the medlar (for which there was an abundance harvested in my first autumn at the garden), I discussed with Paul Cleave, our module convenor, about writing about brambles and nettles. Growing naturally in the hedgerow and towards the entrance to the garden, brambles and nettles thrived, yielding blackberries and strong fibres for the experimental archaeology class to braid into twine.

After finishing the module and graduating, I was offered a job in a wellness garden up in North Staffordshire. The team were enthused about my suggestion about them incorporating a medicinal herb garden within the Victorian walled garden-turned calming plant oasis.

Working with recycled materials such as old railway sleepers, and housing plant and ceramic pot donations, I designed and created a small medicinal herb garden, guiding volunteers to plant aromatic topically applied herbs such as thyme, lavender, rosemary and garlic (as well as calendula and marigold for colour) and on the other side of the sheltered arbour seating, herbs for infusions, including echinacea, St Johns Wort, chamomile and bergamot. And to provoke the thoughts and attitudes of visitors, volunteers and passers by, the volunteers and I relocated dandelions and nettles to pots, separating the medicinal herb garden from the cottage border.

The Exeter Community Garden Zine

by Serena Rosewood

There were two main aims to my project – firstly to create a snapshot in the community garden’s history and everything it means to the people who use it, and secondly to actively promote wellbeing through the process of zining, which is very creative and self-expressive!

I think zines are an amazing medium, especially for this project as they mirror many elements of community gardening. For example, they share the same self-sufficient, DIY philosophy. They are democratic, in that anyone can get involved and they are somewhat anti-capitalist, as they position people as active creators rather than passive consumers. They are both very sustainable in that they encourage the recycling of old materials, such as magazine collages. There’s also an emphasis on intimacy & connection – zines are very personal texts which come directly from the creator without being edited by a third party, and, in the case of both this zine and community gardens, they are co-produced, helping to foster connections between people and a sense of community.

To get gardeners to reflect on their experience of the garden, I posed questions for them to respond to in the zine. These questions were designed to encourage reflection and gratitude – both of which have been shown to improve wellbeing.

Below are some of the answers they gave:

My deepest thanks and appreciation goes to the Exeter Community Garden, and specifically the members who gave their time to help me create this zine with their thoughtful reflections and bountiful creativity.

I would also like to thank Dr Laura Smith who introduced me to the medium of zines through her geography module 'Literature, Environment and Activism', and Paul Cleave for running the excellent module which prompted the creation of this project, 'Gardening, Wellbeing and Community'.

And finally, I would like to thank Arts & Culture Exeter for the opportunity to share this work with a wider audience.

Serena Rosewood