The Chelsea Fringe in Bristol – The alternative garden festival

The Chelsea Fringe in Bristol is an alternative garden festival that celebrates everything from guerrilla gardening and community projects to large-scale installations, performance art, street happenings and much more in between. It’s an open-access fringe festival, which means that if it’s about plants, gardens, flowers or landscape, and it’s interesting or original or quirky – then it’s in. We are the Fringe to the great Chelsea Flower Show – but we are different because we spread far and wide, covering everything that could be conceivably linked with gardens, plants, landscape and environment, with most events and activities free and un-ticketed.

The Chelsea Fringe is entering its fourth year and is bigger than ever before. Tim Richardson, previously the gardens editor at County Life and now a columnist for The Telegraph, is the man behind the festival. “The idea came to me during Chelsea Flower Show week in 2010, a buzzy, busy time for the gardening world. I was lying in bed early morning and was thinking maybe something a bit more could be done around the show, perhaps an exhibition or installation, and then I had the idea for the Fringe,” he remembers.

Starting in London, the Chelsea Fringe word has spread across the UK, with gardening-related events taking place this year in Bristol, London, Aberdeenshire, Brighton, Cambridge, Henley-on-Thames and Kent, and as far afield as Italy and as Nagoya in Japan. The only entry requirement is that projects have to be on topic, legal and interesting.

This year’s Fringe in Bristol promises an eclectic mix of pop-up gardens, a ‘pickup pollinators’ truck, a honeycomb meadow of wild flowers, edible growing trails around the City, community led gardening project, foraging walks and talks, and practical workshops designed to help you connect with nature.

www.chelseafringebristol.co.uk

@FringeInBristol

https://www.facebook.com/chelseafringebristol