The Buds of the Spode China Rose are beginning to Bloom
The first ‘Spode China’ Rose has bloomed outside the Original Spode Factory Site, with many more of the specimen plants anticipated to bloom in the weeks leading up to the opening of the fourth British Ceramics Biennial festival.
BCB visitors will walk through the Spode Rose Garden to the impressive China Hall exhibition space during the festival.
The Spode China Rose project hopes to illuminate the possibilities for future use of the abandoned city garden and following a 2-year project by AirSpace Gallery.
In 2013, AirSpace created a centrepiece - a circular raised bed - built with bricks salvaged from the Spode site, which is planted with a collection of ornamental grasses. Rising from the middle of the raised bed is a plinth, holding a glass dome. The glass dome houses an artwork: The Spode China Rose - a beautifully crafted, bone china rose, that forms the crux of the Spode Rose Garden project. The Spode China Rose is itself, an idea. It is a promise of new life, development, and the future. The Victorian Language of flowers rather aptly, saw the giving of a China Rose as a symbol of beauty, always new.
AirSpace worked with Gareth Fryer, whose family has been breeding roses for over 100 years, to cultivate an old-type rose, fragrant and pure white. 60 plants were produced with 30 going to BCB and 30 being sold to the public.
Additionally, a new segment of the garden has been cleared, with trees and shrubs pruned, opening up previously shrouded flower beds, whilst the main flower bed at the front of the Garden has been de-grassed and ploughed ready for new planting. The centrepiece of this transformative stage is the addition of a brand new circular rose bed.
The gabion-style new rose bed structure rises from the ground made of, a collection of Spode Biscuit-Ware - unfired porcelain dinnerware - rescued from the Spode site, and now forming an emblematic and symbolic home for the Spode China Rose.
