- Wednesday, 20th May, 6:30pm – A Fruity Walk Across Barnes
- Wednesday, 24th June, 6:30pm -The Birds & The Bees: Queer Ecology of Barnes Common
- Saturday, 11th July, 11am -The Healing Herbs of our Land: Community & Ecosystem Health
- Wednesday, 15th July, 6:30pm – Workshop: Writing in Bloom
Thank you to Kew Village Market for the funding enabling us to offer tickets to these events at a subsidised cost. Please book your tickets (£10 plus booking fee) via this link.
A Fruity Walk Across Barnes with Divya Hariramani
Wednesday, 20th May, 6:30pm
Let’s go on a Fruity Walk through Barnes, where trees tell stories of resilience, adaptation and community, rooted in its long history of orchards and market gardens. Starting at Vine Road Recreation Ground, once part of a working orchard, we’ll explore historic apple and pear trees, wander across Barnes Common, and follow quiet streets towards a community orchard and unexpected front‑garden fruit trees.
Through mindfulness, tree identification and storytelling, we’ll uncover the surprising fruit trees that thrive here, and consider what they reveal about our relationship to the land and each other.
Come curious and leave nourished, in more ways than one.
Divya Hariramani runs Fruity Walks, a London‑based project mapping unusual fruit trees and telling the stories behind them. She works as a renewable energy and sustainability consultant and is a London National Park City Ranger, collaborating on community orchard planting, signage and guided walks that help Londoners discover and care for the fruit trees woven through the city’s streets and parks. She shares her findings on Instagram @fruitywalks.
The Birds & The Bees: Queer Ecology of Barnes Common with Connor Butler
Wednesday, 24th June, 6:30pm
Did you know that scientists often struggle to find male woodlice, that male trees can turn female, or that many of London’s birds partner up into same-sex couples?
‘Queer Ecology’ aims to challenge what we think of as being ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ and celebrates diversity in all life. Join ecologist Connor Butler on a guided nature walk through Barnes Common to explore the diverse and unusual lifecycles found in the ‘unnatural’ plants and animals right outside your doorstep. You’ll learn how to use a hand lens to identify common species of plants and invertebrates and gain a new fascination with the natural world.
This gentle tour around the common invites all curious minds (aged 16+) interested in meeting others, learning identification skills, and seeing nature from a new perspective.
Connor the Ecologist is a London-based entomologist and educator on a mission to make people notice and appreciate the smaller details in nature. His current work focuses on Queer Ecology, challenging traditional ideas about what is considered “natural” or “unnatural”. He has had over 3,000 people join his Queer Ecology tours to date, celebrating nature in all its diversity. Connor is the former Head of Learning at Chelsea Physic Garden and now conducts beetle surveys across many of London’s parks and gardens.
The Healing Herbs of our Land: Community and Ecosystem Health with Rasheeqa Ahmad
Saturday, 11th July, 11am
We’ll walk, talk and meet our medicinal friends of the garden and the wild, sharing stories of their place in the mix of symbiotic life systems we are all part of, their folklore and applications in health, and how our relationships with them can support our and their wellbeing. High summer offers a rich mix of flower and seed remedies, we will smell and taste, make a seasonal infusion to drink together, and discover how we can build community through herbalism and our shared cultural histories of plant medicine.
Rasheeqa (Hedge Herbs) is a medical herbalist in her community in Walthamstow in north London. She has been practicing since 2012, offering treatment with herbal medicine and teaching about its many aspects, alongside a wider mix of work whose aim is reconnecting us as communities with the potential of this knowledge and craft as a way to support healthier living systems and relationships. She is inspired by her early involvement with the Radical Herbalism Gathering in exploring how to make plant medicine accessible and restore balance to its practice in the contexts of systemic inequalities and oppressions that are part of our shared histories.
She is part of Community Apothecary Waltham Forest in her locality, a social enterprise that brings community members together around a patchwork of medicinal herb gardens where they can learn about growing and making medicines together, exchanging knowledge and peer support and seeding the model in other neighbourhoods so that we create landscapes of healing everywhere! She was also a co-founder of the Mobile Apothecary in Bethnal Green, a street medicine distribution project bringing solidarity herbal healthcare to people from rough sleeper and less well resourced communities there.
Workshop: Writing in Bloom with Tutku Barbaros
Wednesday, 15th July, 6:30pm
A flowy, gentle and playful creative writing workshop in and inspired by nature. Using a series of playful creative writing exercises we’ll respond to the nature around us with words and imagination. All levels of experience welcome.
Tutku is a writer – across forms – trauma informed workshop facilitator and events curator of Turkish Cypriot Heritage. Her debut book “All The Women She Knows: Stories Of Growth, Change and Sisterhood” was published in Feb 2024 and has since been called “the perfect women’s history month read” (Darling Zine). Most recently her short story “Saunce, Sprinkles and A Flake Please Boss” was published in the Deptford Literature Festival Anthology.
She is an alumna of the Royal Court Writers Programme, Google Rare Leadership Academy and Sphinx Theatre’s year long development programme SphinxLab. Her debut play LAYLA AND YOUSSEF was longlisted for the Bruntwood and the Women’s Prize for Playwriting. Most recently Tutku was published in the Deptford Literature Festival Anthology with her story “Sauce, Sprinkles and A Flake Please Boss.”