2025 - 2028

Visitors are invited to sit and walk amongst the plants, trees and visiting wildlife immersing themselves in nature to get a glimpse of what life used to be like in Broadmead.

You can access an audio piece that illustrates our intertwined relationship with the plant world connecting us to Bristol prior to the 1400s, when Broadmead was a wet meadow, regularly flooded by the river Frome. You are then taken back 6000+ years, into Neolithic times, when Broadmead was a wet woodland filled with alder, willow, hazel and birch. On the surrounding slopes there would have been elm, oaks and lime trees growing. Wild game birds, waterfowls, red deer, aurochs and wild boar lived on the land.

The audio piece is also a journey inwards to visit our bodies' microorganisms that populate us. It explores how we humans are houses for microorganisms. “They are our friends, our neighbours, our family and without them we wouldn’t be alive.” 

The wildflower installation’s soil and plant species have been carefully chosen to mimic the meadow and woodland that once may have grown there.

The installation is made up of 70 wildflower and tree boxes spread out between Broadmead West (outside the Arcade), Merchant Street North (outside TK Maxx) and Merchant Street South (near corner Philadelphia Street). 

The work will be installed for the next three years for Bristol residents and passers-by to enjoy. 

The audio work was inspired by evolutionary biologist, Professor Lynn Margulis, mycologist and writer Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, plant biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer and biochemist, molecular biologist and Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Sir Richard J. Roberts.