Honeyscribe’s Plant Prescriptions project will create opportunities for healthcare professionals at the RD&E Hospital to access free, high-quality creative encounters during the course of their busy shifts to support health and wellbeing, connect staff to the natural environment (the wild/cultivated spaces on/near the hospital campus) as well as connecting people to each other. Plants and placemaking are inextricably linked, and this project will help advocate for green cultivated and biodiverse spaces across the NHS trust site and celebrate those that already exist.

The project will deliver a carefully curated programme of botanically themed workshops and creative encounters delivered by Honeyscribe and Southwest-based freelance artists to bring joyful creative activities to the people who care for the people of Exeter and beyond. Recent work with NHS trusts over the last few years has revealed how art can offer a powerful way to support staff, which in turn helps support the communities they care for.

This project has been designed to actively focus on activities such as making miniature artworks from pressed plants and botanical extracts, as well as other activities where the medicinal and therapeutic properties of plants are celebrated by making paintings, miniature sculptures and through plant storytelling by Exeter-based ethnobotanist/ author Robin Harford.

Hospital staff will also be able to engage with the Plant Pharmacy, a mobile pop-up multisensory dispensary extolling the intimate relationship between people and plants, and the role of plants in healing and wellbeing. Each person who encounters it will have a unique ‘plant prescription’ dispensed to them in the form of a miniature herbarium artwork containing a selection of vascular plant specimens.

About Honeyscribe

Led by founder and Artist/Artistic Director Amy Shelton, Honeyscribe uses creative practice to draw attention to the intricate relationship between biodiversity, environmental wellbeing and human health. By creating artworks and imaginative participatory programmes that invite a re-evaluation of our relationship with the environment their work helps connect people to the places they live, to our shared ecology and natural heritage.

​Working across multiple forms and disciplines and in collaboration with a wide range of artists, writers, scientists, botanists, conservationists, researchers, architects, designers, Honeyscibe’s work focuses on how art can be a potent tool to reconnect people to the natural world and one another.

Honeyscribe work with NHS Trusts across the UK, devising projects and creating artworks that bring the natural world into the interior spaces of healthcare settings through biophilic design to help support staff and patient wellbeing.

www.honeyscribe.org