At Company Drinks we’ve always encouraged people to see plants the way we do: as our friends, as medicine, as food, as a network of connected living systems….

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Since 2014, Company Drinks have been working with drinks producers, farmers, green spaces, food businesses and local residents to explore the histories, community collaborations and drinks-making potential of nature! We’ve made delicious drinks from trees in our parks, gleaned food waste, foraged flavours, even made delicious fizz from a local “pest” plant.

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In 2017 we launched Barking Grow Club, a weekly session where “We tend to our wellbeing as we tend to our plants”, and in 2019, the group started growing, harvesting and blending ranges of herbal teas, with each herbal blend being created in response to a particular wellbeing need, and with Perfect Puns provided by the Grow Club members!

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In 2020 we started getting together regularly to ‘Have and Make Tea‘, something which we continued remotely using Grow Club herbs for ‘Tea by Post Club‘ during the first lockdowns, a way of sharing the benefits of calming plants, while we couldn’t be together in person.

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Last year, Shaun launched the Community Herbal Network, in collaboration with the Mobile Apothecary, unlocking the healing potential of plants and sharing, uncovering and celebrating local knowledge about herbal remedies.

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In 2022, we will be exploring our relationships with plants even further and we’ll be encouraging our groups and partners to ‘Think Differently’ about how we talk about, relate to, remember and share plants.

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We’ll be collaborating with new partners who are working with plants to explore ideas of art and expression, cultural heritage and gender, and we’ll be looking to our plants, having new conversations and hopefully sowing new seeds and generating new ideas that focus on themes such as identity, belonging and local history.

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If you have a different way of talking about, growing or using plants, that you’d like to share with us and our garden, please get in touch with Shaun on shaun@companydrinks.info.

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Watch this space for more information….

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