19/05/2025
🌿 You're Invited to The Big Planting Conference! 🌿
📅 Friday 23 May 2025
🕙 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
📍 HILLS Arts Centre, Waterloo Pl, Sunderland SR1 3HT
Drop in for a morning of inspiration, creativity, and community action!
✨ Free workshops & demos from local legends:
🌼 Just Let Your Soul Grow CIC
🌻 Dead Good CIC
🌾 Sunderland Home Grown CIC
🎨 NSA Arty Workshop
☕ Plus: Free tea & coffee for all guests!
💬 Meet the vendors and learn how we can all help green our streets and grow a more sustainable future — together.
🌳 Spotlight on Dr Katy Vigurs of DEAD GOOD.
Dr Katy Vigurs is a creative death educator in Sunderland and one half of DEAD GOOD. Her past in social research and adult education informs her current work as your friendly eco-funeral guide. Katy works with grieving families as a storyteller & story-keeper. She's a green burial enthusiast and her mantra is "It's okay to decay!"
Katy will be exploring the concept of death as a natural part of life and will show how our future deaths can potentially enrich local nature and natural landscapes. If you want to become a tree when you die, Katy will tell you how! Katy is an expert in natural burial practices. She'll be sharing how natural burial grounds in the North East create habitat for wildlife and preserve existing habitats (e.g. woodland, species rich meadows, orchards). Interest in natural death is growing as people are becoming increasingly concerned about the emissions and fuel-use associated with gas-fired cremation, the use of stone for gravestones (often shipped considerable distances from overseas quarries), or the use of formaldehyde for embalming, which has an adverse effect upon groundwater. Come along and talk with Katy about the choices we can make so that our deaths won’t cost the earth and will instead create an ecologically protective, nature-rich legacy.
✨ Come as you are, stay as long as you like — and let’s grow something beautiful. 🌍
