Manchester is about to be turned into a massive urban garden for Dig the City festival

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

What happens when a beautiful urban garden opens in front of Selfridges? Dig the City is back

Manchester is about to answer Chelsea. Urban gardening festival Dig the City is back next week, planting 28 Show Gardens and installations, including an award-winning bee garden, a soil-less garden and a community garden made with no expense, only salvage.

Models posed with fresh floral umbrellas to mark the launch. The theme for this year is Innovate and Interact, with highlights including a pop-up meadow on wheels from horticultural experts Kew Gardens, a mountain stream by Hulme Community Garden Centre, a garden which erupts from cracks in Manchester’s pavements and a vertical growing experiment with bug houses and a mud kitchen from Incredible Edible. 

Manchester's most famous street will host the Coronation Street The Tour Garden. Partly designed by the city council, the garden explores how a famous ginnel behind the Rovers Return can be turned green and beautiful.  The garden will be used to create a new green alleyway in the city following the festival.

IWM North will be celebrating their Horrible Histories: Blitzed Brits summer exhibition with a ‘Dig for Victory’ allotment, and hanging baskets will bloom in New Cathedral Street, aiming to create colour and fragrance at every turn.

Manchester Jazz Festival will be taking over the New Cathedral Street Bandstand on the opening Sunday, and there will be three spectacular gardens fresh from RHS Tatton, including a previous Tatton Gold winner, the bee garden and a striking space where visitors can become RHS designers and rearrange the plants to their liking.

Visitors can take a plant to St Ann’s Square on the opening weekend to make a triumphant Manchester ‘People’s Garden’. Those who bring a pot will be into a fabulous prize draw, with plants will be donated to local community groups as part of Dig the City’s lasting legacy.

A special moving fashion show, #digforfashion, will strut on a green grass runway, giving fans the chance to vote for their favourite window on social media.

• Dig the City runs July 31 - August 6 2015. Visit digthecity.co.uk for full details.

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Garden Museum, London
Situated on the South Bank of the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament, with a spectacular home in the former St Mary-at-Lambeth Parish Church, which itself its steeped in history and has some interesting stories to tell.

Museum No.1, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Plants and People exhibition illustrates how we depend on plants, including products from the Amazon to Australia, the artistry of Japanese papers and lacquerware, plant-based medicines that helped revolutionise human healthcare and examples of the raw materials that make our music, food and clothes.

National Museum of Rural Life Scotland, Strathclyde
Discover how 300 years of farming and rural home life have shaped and altered Scotland’s countryside at a period townhouse with Aberdeen Angus cattle, Tamworth pigs, Ayrshire cows, Blackface sheep, Clydesdale horses and White Leghorn and Black Rock hens.

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/science-and-nature/art532720-manchester-is-about-to-be-turned-into-a-massive-urban-garden-for-dig-the-city-festival