Belfast Community Plant Library – How The Idea Came About
The Belfast Community Plant Library is a collaborative initiative between Belfast Design Week and onebite Design Studio (Hong Kong, Singapore and London). The project was inspired by an impromptu meeting between the two organisations in Hong Kong in 2024, where they discovered a shared set of values and a common vision for creating meaningful, plant-centred community spaces.
We (Belfast Design Week and Blick Shared Studios alongside Venturefolk) had recently completed the Grow Your Own Way project. A project which brought together designers and gardeners to explore the potential for supporting residents to grow their own food within the urban environments of Botanic and the Holylands in Belfast. We were in Hong Kong working on a design installation for the British Council Spark Festival 2024 when we met Alan from onebite design at his studio where we saw the plant library on the street outside. We had a great meeting with Alan and left very inspired by the work they do. We loved the plant library as an accessible intervention to bring green spaces to cities. We left with hopes of collaborating in the future and in 2025 Alan and his business partner Sarah visited Belfast and we then worked together on Islands of Design for Irish Design Week.
Onebite had come up with the idea for the Community Plant Library in 2021 as a collaborative platform to introduce native plants in Hong Kong. By collaborating with nearly 20 local shops in San Po Kong, a neighbourhood known for light industries and traditional retail shops, the library hoped to display, gather, and introduce plants to reinvigorate the community, and to discover the social and cultural value of a plant in urban context by using plants to initiate conversations and collect interesting information about the community network. The Community Plant Library encouraged local residents to walk around and get to know their community, offering the opportunity for fresh encounters and interactions in public spaces among plant lovers.
In the first part of the programme, onebite worked with 30 partner shops, ranging from snacks shops, herbal tea shops, and eateries to co-design and adopt “plant furniture”, using the power of flora and fauna to transform the look and mood of their interior spaces. The furniture was made with discarded wood materials gathered by Coutou Woodworking Studio from Nan Fung Group’s construction site. Based on a few prototypes, onebite and Coutou then customised the plant furniture based on requirements gathered from partner shops, making the design process to design a dual functional plant rack collaborative and insightful in understanding users’ needs.
In 2023 the second edition of Community Plant Library took place in Hong Kong in partnership with Partnerships Community Development (PCD). The location shifted to Sheung Wan and Sham Shui Po, a traditional residential neighbourhood with both new and traditional arts and cultural attractions such as bookshops, cafes, and art galleries.
Apart from retaining popular programmes in the inaugural round (2021) such as the roving plant clinic, the second round also invited groups of participants, comprising residents and others of all ages to join as plant librarians, mapping out the plants in the neighbourhood and designing wood furniture for potted plants through workshop and guided tour sessions. They were also involved in creating a large-scale Community Plant Map of Sheung Wan with well- known map illustrator, Maoshan Connie. they also invited local artists to lead plant-inspired art workshops, such as botanical storybook sharing and creation workshops led by artist Connie, Garlic Lamp Making workshop conducted by artist Tsang Tak-ping, and illustrator Ivy Wong’s botanical sketching workshop.
