Our Story
Wayward Plants is an initiative founded 20 years ago by Wayward, an award-winning design and placemaking practice best known as pioneers in “meanwhile spaces,” transforming vacant urban land and interim-use sites into design-led, culturally-activated green spaces.
In 2026, Wayward Plants enters a new chapter as we launch our first reuse centre and move towards becoming an independent charity.
Our story began with an abandoned cactus thrown to the kerb, soil spilling from a cracked pot onto the pavement. Most people would have walked past it. We stopped. When we picked it up, its thorny spines caught our legs. But through that small act of rescue, the plant survived, and something else began to grow alongside it: a new way of thinking about value, waste, and the hidden potential of unwanted things.
What followed were a series of idiosyncratic rescue missions and adoption events for unwanted plants. There was no grand plan. Just small acts of rescue and exchange, connecting people through plants and stories.
Our very first Wayward Plant (2006).
Wayward Plant Adoption Centre at The Barbican, London, as part of the exhibition, Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet (2009)
Wayward’s first projects were gardens so ephemeral that we called them “Halfway Homes for Wayward Plants.” Over time, these experiments became more ambitious as we began transforming interim-use land into meanwhile spaces and creating large-scale public installations. Their short lifecycles allowed us to refine strategies for deconstruction and salvage, extending the life of plants and materials long after the installations had disappeared.
Wayward’s first meanwhile space, The Union Street Urban Orchard (2010), built from reclaimed materials and rescued plants, and Helsinki Plant Tram (2013), a temporary rollercoaster-inspired urban garden commissioned by the British Council designed to disassemble into 100 planters distributed to community gardens across the city.
After 20 years of temporary landscapes, we’ve come to a simple realisation: everything is temporary. Whether a landscape is designed to last days or decades, it will eventually change, be dismantled, regenerated or disappear altogether. And unless these landscapes are designed for deconstruction and reuse, their materials will ultimately end up in landfill.
Following a decade as the Official Reuse Partner of the Royal Horticultural Society, we are now launching the Wayward Plants Reuse Centre within our newest and most ambitious meanwhile space to date, Cultivate Colindale, a green space hub for community, culture and the circular economy. Our aim is to pioneer the infrastructure and systems needed for large-scale landscape reuse, transforming how plants, trees and landscape materials move through the built environment. Working with designers, growers, contractors, institutions and communities, Wayward Plants champions landscapes designed with their whole life in mind - from their construction and public life through to dismantling and reuse.
We’re now working to change systems, but we still believe change begins with small acts of care.
