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THE GARDEN

The Tasting Garden by Mark Dion

Adjoining the Storey Gallery is a large walled garden which had been neglected for many years. In 1998 the Gallery succeeded in attracting the Tate Gallery Liverpool and the Henry Moore Trust to fund the creation of a permanent environmental artwork, The Tasting Garden by Mark Dion.

This work was part of 'artranspennine98' - an exhibition of international contemporary visual art in which 50 artists created 40 artworks for 30 sites from Liverpool to Hull. The Tasting Garden is one of the few permanent pieces.

The paths through the Tasting Garden are in the form of the branches of a tree. Reminiscent of a family tree, or an evolutionary tree, the branch pathwork also evokes the tree-of-life, a literary and visual metaphor with a rich cultural history.

Each of the four main branches of this tree-pathwork bears a major northern fruit (apple, cherry, plum and pear), and each small branch path is dedicated to a particular variety of tree, together with a bronze sculpture of its fruit. Many of the trees chosen for the Tasting Garden are rare or endangered varieties which are threatened by the loss of small-scale farmlands or the shift to monoculture agricultural production. Industrial farming privileges only a handful of plants which exhibit commercially desirable traits such as long shelf-life, large yields , sweet taste, and pest resistance. A number of breeds which have long been neglected offer not only a more expansive and challenging taste spectrum, but also make up a reservoir of genetic diversity.

When the garden is mature, the public will be encouraged to sample ripe fruits from trees, and to experience challenging flavours and textures which are normally inaccessible to all but a handful of expert cultivators.

The visitor will also encounter "The Arboriculturist's Workshed"; , a dimiutive folly or monument, which acknowledges the grand achievements and skills, in terms of both physical labour and intellect, of the men and women who created the diversity of fruit varieties we can all enjoy.

The Tasting Garden is a hybrid - part orchard and part artwork.

The Garden is an artwork - the artwork is a garden.

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The Storey Gallery occasionally exhibits temporary artworks in the other half of the garden.

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