The Kidding Around Collective bring you The Nursery, a dedicated space for 0 – 5-year-olds and their families. Come and rest your weary legs in our sensory Mud Café. Explore your creative side and help us design the perfect garden using mixed media and the Festival for inspiration, come let your imagination run wild, with sensory exploration for even our littlest visitors. Bring your designs to life in our magical fairy garden - create your own peg fairy and use our range of materials to create an interactive playscape and explore the magic beneath our feet in our specially designed tent and garden.

Join Emily Dodd for a Storytelling Adventure! Each session will combine music, dance, science with storytelling in a unique way. Emily is passionate about wildlife, science and books. She is the author of 11 non-fiction science schoolbooks and four picture books about Scottish wildlife, and a screenwriter for CBeebies (Tiny Wonders, Nina and the Neurons).

This surreal pair of Giant birds are out and about and on the lookout for tasty snacks. Cheeky and mischievous, they will be sticking their beaks in wherever they can. Hold onto your chips!

A show-stopping centrepiece just washed ashore! This 18-metre-long sperm whale is guaranteed to enchant as well as having a story to tell. Step inside its seaweed-strewn belly and be told seafaring tales of the Pirate's Misadventure featuring mermaids, treasure and secrets, or watch as a turtle swims inside telling sad tales of our plastic ocean problem. This installation is both educational and both adults and children will be fascinated and enlightened.

Meet our loveable lumbering Treemendous Treants. Towering over guests these full detailed costumes are guaranteed to grab attention as well as create perfect photo opportunities. Fully mobile and armed with an arsenal of tree-mendous tree related humour.

Zelva is the oldest and wisest giant puppet tortoise who plods along with her keeper, encouraging us all to just go a bit slow. All ages will be delighted by Zelva as she always seems to be hungry and can easily be swayed where food is concerned, or simply by a hug. Her human keeper has all the facts about this gentle giant. Hares not welcome!

on the Pavilion Stage

Visit our Potting Sheds, dotted around the site hosting artists, performers and community organisations. Pop inside to your own planters using pre-cut scrap wood with Free Wheel North; participate in music and movement performance, write poetry or create your own seed bombs and avocado starter seed kits with ETSD and much more.

Musican and composer Amble Skuse and dancer Olga Uzikaeva present their participatory music and movement performance, “Chop Chop”. Participants will be invited to prepare fresh fruits for a community salad. Microphones are connected from the kitchen equipment to Amble’s laptop and software, allowing them to mix the sounds in real time. Olga will then create dance improvisation inspired by the sounds of fruits whilst wearing Mimu gloves which track her movements. The fruit salad will then be eaten together with participants, with leftover food being donated to a food bank.

Free Wheel North is working with Boomerang Woodwork, a non-profit wood workshop in Maryhill that supports marginalised and excluded groups through therapeutic woodwork programmes. For their potting shed, they will be holding planter-making activities using pre-cut scrap wood as a “DIY Kit” for growing your own herbs or small plants at home. Workshoppers will also be learning transferable DIY skills and learning about reusing waste to create value. For passers-by, there will be a “contribution planter” where visitors can decorate and attach a plank of wood to a planter that will then be displayed in Maryhill for the community to enjoy.

ESTD will be hosting multiple workshops across the festival. Morven Mulgrew will be teaching participants to “Make Your Own Avocado Seed Starter” kit using slab-building techniques and stoneware clay. ESTD will fire your work and it will be available for collection two weeks later in Glasgow, along with a seed of your own to grow. Jemima Damsey-Wright will be hosting a print workshop using potatoes, allowing you to bring home a poster that can teach you how to grow at home. Finally, Saskia Pomeroy will be holding a seed bomb and plant seed tray workshop, consisting of easy fruit and vegetable plants for smaller spaces.

Sacro will be hosting a Poetry Potting Shed, inviting participants to have a go at writing nature-related haikus on two large blackboards. Sacro’s own Garden Projects in Tollcross Allotments and Park and in Bellahouston Demonstration Garden have their own Potting Shed Poetry Society and the poems that their members have written will be exhibited and given away throughout the festival. Sacro will also have a microphone set up in front of their shed for poetry readings.

Connect’s Potting Sheds programme will bring together allotment staff to highlight how fun growing and sowing can be and how STEAM can work with nature and food production. A wealth of inspiring and unusual activities is on offer. Join Connect to make seed bombs, understand the greenhouse effect, try out VR headsets, build your own wind generator and make scarecrows from crisp packets.

Over three days, Paragon’s groove artists will engage with participants in ‘Grow Your Groove’ - accessible and inclusive musical improvisation sessions, live jams, and soundscape creation using found sounds and food. Their shed will have various vegetables and plants connected to MIDI controllers, turning them into sample pads and allowing people to play them as if they were instruments. No musical experience is necessary to take part in “growing” a new piece of original music.

P Ploy (Noppawan Bunluesilp) and Iga Sobieraj create interactive experiences in virtual reality and animation. In their project, “The Goodness of Weeds”, participants will be able to scan a QR code and find an animated character guiding them through information and facts about weeds using augmented reality on their mobile phones. Infamous weeds such as sticky willies, ground elders, nettles, and – of course - dandelions are not only vital to our environment, but can be delicious as well. Learn which weeds can be eaten and how to cook them using pop-up recipes and videos inspired by Thai and Polish backgrounds.

Theatre-makers Scott Thomas and Emma McNeill will be producing a community-made multi-media performance, expressing themes of nature, growth, and sustainability in a theatrical and physical way. Participants take part in a “Lucky Dip Script”, picking out lines taken from a pre-written piece, recording their line into a microphone at the shed, and playing around with audio filters, speed, volume, and tone.  Infrared elements reflect climate change and the earth’s continued overheating; potting shedders can also help create a mood board using photos, recycled materials, and natural items  which will be available on the Dandelion website at the end of the Glasgow festival.

Writer and food-artist, Sean Wai Keung, will be leading an installation titled Fortunes for Us, giving people the opportunity to write their own ‘fortune’ and place them inside fortune cookies across their potting shed. In return for giving their fortunes, participants will be able to take a cookie with another written fortune away with them. Their installation aims to highlight the accessibility of food sharing and community engagement across cultures.

Working with the Glasgow Food Policy Partnership (GFPP), Thalia Groucott will be facilitating collage zine-making workshops based on the six themes of the GFPP: Food and the Environment, Food Economy, Children and Young People, Food Procurement and Catering, Community Food, and Food Poverty – Fair Food for All. Participants will have access to pre-cut images, news articles, and secondhand magazines and they will be “Collaging the World We Want to See”. The resulting pages will be scanned and compiled into an artistic and collaborative zine that highlights the GFPP and Dandelion’s aim to start a conversation on how we value the food we eat and to raise awareness of food poverty and the environmental consequences of how we currently produce our food.

Wind&Bones will be creating a home-grown and home-cooked shared feast of food and stories. Wind&Bones will also be hosting a virtual potting shed as an online stories garden, where stories from the festival will be uploaded so people can view them on their phone and tablet.

How did your mum or dad make their soup? Artist Donna Rutherford will be posing this question to festival goers.  Their stories will be edited and played through a small speaker over the next three days to create a joyful participatory experience exploring our emotional and cultural connections to food. Share your food stories, leading to the creation of a cookbook combining the stories of Glasgow’s international residents.

Earth is the only home we know but the idea of life off planet is no longer the realm of science fiction and one day we may look off planet for our next ‘home’. With Mars the most habitable destination in our solar system we’re starting there but need your help to build a sustainable colony.

Get thinking, make use of the LEGO tools at your disposal and let your imagination run wild to build farms, homes, labs, vehicles – or anything else you think humans might need to live on another planet – and add them to our Mars landscape.

Tamara Hedderwick will be hosting natural “crop protection” mandala-making workshops, inspired by her own experiences growing seedlings and keeping slugs and pests away from her own plants by using sand, eggshells, and salt. The mandalas we’ll be making at the potting shed will be based on patterns that form through Tamara’s experiments in tie-dying cotton using beetroot and onion skins. Tamara will also be giving away posters from Greenspace Scotland of “Our Growing Community”, as well as displaying seeds and information from the Glasgow Seed Library (some of which will be material used in the mandala-making throughout the festival!).

Propagate will be introducing participants to all the elements that make food production possible. Their Soil and Soul exhibit will allow participants to play with soil, try their hand at making seed-bombs, and get up close to their Worms at Work display. They’ll also talk about Regenerative Farming, with an agroecological jigsaw with the voices of farmers telling stories about why they do what they do.  Propagate will also be giving practical advice on growing in small spaces, square meter gardening, and identifying whether insects and animals are friends or foes.

SRUC’s Plant Clinic will offer support to visitors who want to discuss their gardening growing issues and present fun facts about what people can do to help Scotland’s plant health and achieve our net zero targets. Come along for some friendly advice and to explore the careers and courses available for young people in the vibrant growing sector.

From Unexpected Gardens to total controlled environment growing to musicians composing from the perspective of plants, come to our very own Dandelion Potting Shed to learn the full Dandelion story in technicolour - a beautiful collision of science, art, community and heart!