[Lonely Hearts] Garden Club
Jess Miller & Claire Sutton

Transforming City Slickers to Worm Ticklers

Life is undoubtedly better for high-density apartment dwellers when you realise that the apartment that you live in, is not just a building – but a critical part of a regenerative natural system.
Gardening – whether its care for indoor house plants, windowsill flowers or a balcony veggie plot – connects us to nature, and to one another.

Since COVID times, people have never been more interested in growing stuff. But in apartments, there is little room to repot your plants, shovel soil, compost, water and raise seedlings, so what (more than 80% of people who live in apartments) need is:
An apartment dwellers garden club/nursery.

City slickers are transformed into ‘worm-ticklers’ by amending planning controls and plans of management that challenge the perception of what amenity really is from nail salons, dry cleaners and convenience stores to a communal nursery or ‘Garden Club’.

With a few very simple tweaks in planning controls, a creative strata community and a social enterprise model, the ground plane of an apartment building is redefined from a place where people simply consume stuff they don’t need, to one that is public, regenerative, creative and nourishing.

The high-density paradox of loneliness is broken by the creation of this ‘bump-space’ where people have an excuse to talk to one another, local jobs are created, rooms, walls and balconies become beautiful, and birds and bugs are beneficiaries.