This year Chelsea Physic Garden is exploring the deep and timeless connection between plants and folklore. Once a place where trainee apothecaries studied plants that could heal or harm, the Garden will become a space for people to reconnect with nature and rediscover the power that plants hold to shape and sustain our lives.

Throughout the year, Folklore ReRooted will reimagine Britain’s folk traditions for a time of ecological awareness and social change. Trails, workshops, installations, performances and rituals will invite visitors to experience the Garden as a living landscape of myth, medicine and memory.

Working with artists, herbalists, storytellers and makers, we are celebrating the enduring bond between people and plants, between the human and more-than-human world. Folklore is rooted in the land. Its rituals honour the shifting of the seasons, the flowering and fading of life, and our shared need for meaning. In a city where many feel cut off from natural rhythms, the Garden is offering a space where these traditions can take new form. This is not nostalgia but a living, evolving practice that connects people to story, to nature and to each other.

At a time when folk culture is sometimes used to serve exclusion or idealised pasts, we are reclaiming it as a practice of care, imagination and belonging. Together with artists and communities, we are creating new folk stories and customs for London. These will be dazzling and unruly, fragile and fierce, grounded in the natural world and alive with possibility.