Local landscape gardener and artist, Cynthia Byers, and psychotherapist Mary Green, are seeking a church community within the Diocese of Norwich to explore collaborating with them to create a medicinal plant labyrinth. Mary explains:
“In celebration of the Nature’s holistic and health promoting resources, we have been inspired to create a design and vision for a labyrinth. The paths are defined by Medicinal plants with the elements of water, scent and sound being carried through them; it also incorporates a wheelchair path.
“Our inspiration has come from the Museum of Environment in Rwanda with its roof top exhibit of medicinal plants, and from the Physic gardens at Norwich and Ely Cathedrals and the Monastery at Glastonbury. It is also informed by our experience of regularly putting a labyrinth on the beach throughout the Covid Pandemic.
“We believe strongly in the importance of holistic medicine, aware that for some this includes a spiritual practice; thus central to the design is the labyrinth representing a spiritual tool which is inclusive of all faith practices or none. We ambitiously hope to take it to Sandringham or Chelsea Flower show, in which case we would apply for sponsorship from outside sources. We are not looking for financial help, rather the enthusiasm and voices of a community, with some land, who resonate with this idea and want to help it to evolve. Please contact us, we would love to hear from you!”
Please contact Mary Green and Cynthia Byers directly at:
Read the full vision document HERE
Labyrinths we have created
Home Labyrinths (Grass, Grass and Stone), The Covid Community Project, Overstrand (Beach Sand)*, The Labyrinth Exhibition, The Belfry, Overstrand (Wood)*, Labyrinth Day at Overstrand School (Chalk), Hessian Cloth Community Labyrinth (illustrated at The Belfry Bus Stop in Overstrand), Laid under The Gaia Art Project at St Peter Mancroft in Norwich (Wood representing beach groins, with plastic rubbish from the sea threaded through the groins), Hemingford Grey Church (Stone and Grass), San Francisco Labyrinth at Lands End (Stone), Gorleston Beach Community Art Project (Beach Sand), Little Stukely Church (Stone and Grass).
*During the Covid pandemic we put a labyrinth on the beach near Cromer once a month in 2020-21 for people to walk and leave messages around. We honoured the words and the labyrinth as it was taken by the tide back into the sea. We also created a large Celtic labyrinth on the beach in June 2021 for people to walk in memory of the lives that had been lost during Covid. 1,452 stones around the edge of the labyrinth represented all the lives that had been lost in Norfolk during the pandemic up to that point. During the summer of 2022, we had a six-week exhibition in Overstrand about the Covid Community Labyrinth.