"How Does Your Garden Grow"'s photostream

Photograph appeal: How Does Your Garden Grow? At the Museum of East Anglian Life

The Museum of East Anglian Life needs your help with an exciting new photographic project! As part of our redevelopment of Abbots Hall, a Grade 2* Queen Anne house, we want to collect your pictures for inclusion in our Garden Room display.

Throughout Abbots Hall, we are investigating the ideas of home and belonging. What makes us feel at home? Can we feel at home when we are not in our houses?

This is where you come in; we want to find out just how important the garden is to our sense of home. According to the National Trust’s Space to Grow report, published earlier this year, “Over 70 per cent of the population think that spending time in gardens is important for their quality of life.”

We want to hear from you! What does your garden mean to you? How do you use your garden? Do you garden for pleasure or is it a chore? What is it that makes you proud of your bit of garden space?

We’re looking for images of all types of garden, from the large ornamental gardens of places like Helmingham Hall, right through to terraces and allotments. But most importantly we want pictures of you actually doing things in gardens; throwing parties, mowing the lawn, having barbeques, or just relaxing on a sun lounger! These pictures will help us to understand the importance of gardens to the people of East Anglia and will form the basis for part of our Garden Room display.

If you want to contribute, it’s as easy as uploading your photo or photos to Flickr, adding us to your contacts and then tagging us into “people in this photo”. Please upload your photo at as high a resolution as possible. If you're new to flickr, you can find guidance in setting up and using your account here.

If you select “Attribution Creative Commons” when setting the license for your photo, this will give us the necessary permission to reproduce the image if we choose to include it in our display. If your photograph contains children under the age of 16 we may need to verify that you are or you have the permission of their parent/guardian.

Alternatively, you can post your photographs and any general enquiries to us at:
How Does Your Garden Grow?,
Museum of East Anglian Life,
Stowmarket, Suffolk,
IP14 1DL

If you have any other questions, feel free to email:
jed.howlett@eastanglianlife.org.uk


About the Museum

The Museum of East Anglian Life is one of the biggest Museums in Suffolk. It occupies over 80 acres of countryside in the heart of Stowmarket—that’s roughly equivalent to 80 football pitches or 16,000 parked cars!

The land was originally part of the home farm for the Abbots Hall estate. The estates history dates from Medieval times when it was an outlying manor for St Osyth’s Priory in Essex. It passed through numerous owners until it was taken on by the Longe family in 1904.

Huge changes in the 1950′s and ’60s meant England was in danger of losing long established skills, equipment and buildings if something was not done to rescue them. Individual collectors and the Suffolk Local History Council worked to conserve and display local agricultural and industrial materials. After several years of temporary exhibitions across the county, the Misses Vera & Ena Longe placed 70 acres of farming land, along with Abbot’s Hall itself, in trust to be used as a Museum.

The Museum of East Anglian Life opened in 1967 and is a modern memorial to their foresight and vision.