Church Covered of Grass by Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey

British artists Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey recently transformed a landmark church in South East London by covering the interior in a layer of living grass. Their artwork makes explicit connections with urban political ecologies by highlighting the temporal nature of processes of growth and decay in sites of architectural and ecological interest as well as contemporary art galleries and museums worldwide. The project is organized by the The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). You can see it for yourself in Dilston Grove’s Clare College Mission Church, South London.



As reported in New Scientist the Grass Wall process involves:

Stripping walls down to bare plasterwork
Smearing the walls with a layer of soft moist clay a few millimetres thick. Moisture content is critical as if it is too wet it will slide off or too dry and it will peel away.
Press in about 10 seeds every square centimetre of clay so that the finished surface resembles a sesame seed cake.
The walls are then watered three or four times a day to make sure that the clay doesn’t dry out.
In about six days the grass will germinate and then only water once per day
Unfortunately the dense growth of the grass starts to get mouldy after about 25 days. This is because the grass grows so densely that air cannot circulate and water becomes trapped. After about a month the grass wall is taken down.