Glasgow Caledonian University. Photo © Glagow Caledonian University.
ing’s second floor. In general terms, the library’s design seems engineered to encourage access for both students and members of the public. Users enter via ground floor automatic doors that do not have barriers (or even require the swipe of a library card) or from one of several interconnected campus build- ings. According to GCU, these teaching spaces are structurally linked to the library to foster student familiarity and confidence with the library’s resources. After following a spiral staircase that features several large skylight windows, reinforcing an architectural connec- tion between inside and outside, the Rooftop Garden is accessed through a simple single door: making it easier to reach than I expected and presenting the garden as no different to any other library space.
In keeping with the rest of the build- ing, the garden appears designed to accommodate a diverse array of users and purposes: combining different colours of plants with grass, gravel and paving stones, and featuring both covered and open seating areas. While visually the space may look more like a social or recreational area, its location near the centre of the library building made it feel to me more like an exten- sion of its indoor spaces: one of several options available for group work, discussion, reading and research.
Library gardens around the world The Garden’s sense of both architectur- al and functional flow – physically sit- uating the garden as part of the library and forging connections between it and the library’s broader resources – is also a characteristic of many other library gardens that I have encountered during
January-February 2020
Interior of Shanghai Library with hanging ivy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons cc-by-sa-2.0 user Another_Believer.
my research, both in the UK and interna- tionally.
and I found images of greenery inside library branches in locations as diverse as Aarhus University Library in Denmark, where plants are situated at the heart of its atrium, and Shanghai Library, with floor-to-ceiling windows and ivy hanging down from balcony levels.
The New Helsinki Central Library in Finland, for example, has a reading room that extends into an outside terrace: achieving what visitors describe as a ‘seamless connection’ between the library and the outside world that helps to pres- ent the library as, according to its archi- tects, ‘Helsinki’s common living room’.4 The Library Planet website also provides an online space where passionate library staff can share images of their workplac- es5
In the United States, Boulder Public Library in Colorado runs a ‘Seed to Table’ initiative that even allows customers to take up to five free packets of seeds of vegetables, herbs or flowers, reinforcing a triangulation of the library, its garden and visitors’ own homes (including those
who may struggle to access affordable and healthy food products from other sources). One particularly unique aspect of Boulder Library’s outdoor provision is its collec- tion of Rooftop Beehives! According to staff, these have helped to generate sever- al initiatives such as the Beeliterate public education programme, combining infor- mation on the beehives with more general literary resources, and even allowed the library to sell beeswax candles and wraps as a fundraising commodity.6 Boulder Library’s garden is main- tained by both staff and volunteers, and a strength of many library gardens I have researched seems to be the blur- ring of boundaries between libraries and their wider communities: combining food, recreation, sociability and sus- tainability through the effective use of library resources. At the CILIPS Autumn Gathering in September 2019, poet and author Joseph Coelho noted in his keynote speech that many UK libraries have similar vegetable growing programmes. Having tweeted his surprise at Dundee Library growing tomatoes when he visited
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