While The National Waterfront Museum’s GRAFT team and volunteers cannot gather to garden the Museum’s courtyard garden at this time, they are nonetheless keeping busy setting up ‘Seeds Out in the Community’ and encouraging us all to grow sunflowers in visible and public spaces to show support for key workers. Here’s a little more about this innovative community project and how it’s grown from a seed of an idea to a flourishing project that grows plants, food and people.

GRAFT: a soil based syllabus is the National Waterfront Museum's edible land and educational project, and a permanent piece of green infrastructure within Swansea City Centre. The project is also a socially engaged work of art by artist Owen Griffiths, and was originally commissioned as part of Now the Hero / Nawr Yr Arwr in 2018 funded by 1418NOW as part of a huge UK wide cultural project commemorating the first World War.

GRAFT works with community groups from a wide range of backgrounds across the city who came together, to transform the Museum's once industrial courtyard into a beautiful, sustainable, organic growing environment; creating an edible landscape to encourage participation and conversation around land use, food and sustainability in an accessible and empowering way.

Owen and Senior Learning Officer Zoe Gealy develop the ongoing program at GRAFT around these ideas of collaboration, sustainability and community. Every Friday, (other than during this lockdown), volunteers young and old work alongside one another to share skills working in wood and metal, learning how to grow plants, gaining qualifications and supporting each other along the way. The project has seen successful apprenticeships develop as a result of its program as well as seeing the long-term mental health benefits of working outside together. New friendships are formed, and people, as well as plants, flourish. During GRAFT’s development, in addition to raised beds, a pergola and benches from local timber, a cob pizza oven and beehives have been introduced to the garden. GRAFT's youngest volunteers come from Cefn Saeson School in Neath and work with Alyson Williams, the resident Beekeeper, learning about biodiversity, the environment and working together to care for the bees.

Some of the produce grown in the garden usually makes its way into delicious meals at the Museum's café whilst some is used for community meals at GRAFT. A portion of produce is used by volunteers, and some is donated to projects and groups throughout the area who provide food for those in need, such as Matts House, Ogof Adullam and the Swansea refugee drop in centre.

SPREADING SEEDS AND SUNSHINE DURING LOCKDOWN

Over the coming weeks GRAFT will be posting seeds through City and County of Swansea’s food parcel scheme and to community groups they regularly work with such as Roots Foundation and CRISIS. The seeds include squash and sunflowers, which were harvested by the gardeners last season.

Another initiative GRAFT is developing in the coming weeks is encouraging people to plant sunflowers in visible and public spaces, to show support for key workers alongside rainbow paintings. People are also invited to post pictures of their successful growing on GRAFT’s social media pages.

To request seeds contact zoe.gealy@museumwales.ac.uk

07810 657170

During lock-down, the GRAFT garden continues to need some tending and so  The National Waterfront Museum's on-site team are watering the GRAFT garden and seedlings during their daily shifts.

With thanks to players of the People’s Postcode Lottery for supporting Amgueddfa Cymru’s public programme of activities and events.

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Are you learning Welsh? This is a short conversation introducing the Fron Haul houses. This conversation is suitable for higher level learners.

We may be in lockdown, but nature continues to thrive, plants continue to need tending and borders weeding. Just as the nation is tending to its gardens, so are the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Historic Gardens Unit team, albeit at a reduced working schedule. Here, Juliet Hodgkiss who maintains St Fagans’ beautiful and varied gardens shares a little about what’s going on there.

To keep safe and maintain distance during the pandemic, each of our team are working one day a week to do essential gardening.  With only one gardener in at any one time we are in total isolation, keeping both ourselves and others safe.  One of the most important jobs we have to do is the planting and maintenance of our collection of heritage potato varieties. These potatoes were donated to the Museum over twenty years ago by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency. As a living object, these potatoes must be grown every year to produce seed potato for the following year. Our collection includes the Lumper, the potato grown at the time of the Irish potato famine, which we grow in Nant Wallter and Rhyd-y-car gardens. We also grow Yam, Myatt’s Ashleaf, Skerry Blue and Fortyfold, all varieties from the 18th and 19th century.

This winter we had a great time planting many new trees in the Gardens, to replace lost trees, add new interest for the visitors and for attracting wildlife. We’ve added four new mulberry trees to the Mulberry Lawn, several species of hawthorn, rowan trees and Berberis shrubs to the terrace banks, three whitebeam, a katsura tree, a snakebark maple and a snowy mespilus by the ponds, crab apples to the Castle Orchard and a variety of native species for future coppicing. While we’re enjoying the warm, dry spring, it does mean that all these new trees need a lot of watering to keep them alive. Many are planted a long distance from the nearest tap, so have to be watered with watering cans.

We are also keeping the plants in our greenhouses and nursery alive. We have many plants which are either rare or unique to St Fagans.  These include two offspring of our fern-leaved beech and seedlings from a pine which was lost in a storm a few years ago. These require daily watering this time of year. Spring is the time of year we replant our beds and borders, filling the gaps left by plants lost over winter. We didn’t get around to planting all the plants we ordered over the winter months before the lockdown, so we’re keeping these plants alive while trying to get as many as possible in the ground, with our greatly reduced staff.

For our avid blog readers, you might recall previous articles about a group of worms which certainly dig! They are the shovel head worms, or to give them their scientific name, magelonids. Shovel head worms are a small group of marine bristle worms (polychaetes), which are sea worms related to earthworms and leeches, with bristles along their bodies. Shovel head worms get their name from their spade-shaped heads, which they use to dig in soft sediments such as sands as muds. They are pretty small and delicate, so although we have them around our coasts, they are often tricky to find. Therefore, they are not as well-known as other marine bristleworms such as lugworms and ragworms, often used by fisherman as bait! Their size also means that they can be pretty difficult to collect, ever tried looking for a worm less than 1 mm wide on a beach? We have! Despite their size they are quite beautiful worms (although, I may be slightly biased!) and like other marine bristleworms they are an important food source for many other sea creatures, and also are the gardeners of the ocean, re-working the sediments like earthworms do on land.

Shovel head worm, Magelona filiformis, first described off Plymouth in 1959

Although, I wear many different hats in the museum, one of my principle jobs is being a taxonomist. Taxonomy is the science of naming, describing and classifying life on earth. That may be finding new species, or re-describing species which were discovered many moons ago. When we find a new species, we draw it, take photographs of it (sometimes using Scanning Electron Microscopes enabling us to Zoom in really closely!), describe it and then pick a name for it in Latin. To give you an example here is a species that I described with colleagues in China.

Shovel head worm, Magelona equilamellae, first described off Southern France in 1964

So, what have we been up to recently? We have been reviewing the shovel head worms of Europe, of which there are currently nine species known. Four of which were first described from the UK, three off France, one off Portugal and one off Sweden. Although, these are worms we know, back when the species were first described we didn’t know all of the features/characters that we needed to know in order to correctly identify and seperate them. Unfortunately, this means that the worms get mis-identified, causing problems for people who monitor the health of our seabeds! This is where we step in, re-describing the species and producing identification keys and guides to help people in the future. Over the last year we have been busy reviewing the species, a paper on which has just been published. Now scientists all around the world will be able to correctly identify their European shovel head worms.

Eight species of shovel head worm found in Europe

We have been doing this with a Professional Training Year Student from Cardiff University, and colleagues from Spain and Portugal. 

Find out more about our work on ‘Worms that Dig!’

West African Worms that Dig 

More on West African shovel head worms

Species new to science, Shovel head Worms from around the world