Adjoining the Storey Gallery is a large walled garden in two sections. It is the site of the first recorded works by Andy Goldsworthy. He was a student when the building housed the art department of Preston Polytechnic.

The Tasting Garden by Mark Dion

The garden was neglected for many years, but in 1998 the Gallery succeeded in attracting the Tate Gallery Liverpool and the Henry Moore Trust to fund the creation of a permanent environmental artwork, The Tasting Garden by Mark Dion.

This work was part of artranspennine98 - an exhibition of international contemporary visual art in which 50 artists created 40 artworks for 30 sites from Liverpool to Hull. The Tasting Garden is one of the few permanent artworks.

The paths through The Tasting Garden are in the form of the branches of a tree. Reminiscent of a family tree, or an evolutionary tree, the branch pathwork also evokes the tree-of-life, a literary and visual metaphor with a rich cultural history.

Each of the four main branches of this tree-pathwork bears a major northern fruit (apple, cherry, plum and pear), and each small branch path is dedicated to a particular variety of tree, together with a bronze sculpture of its fruit.

Many of the trees chosen for The Tasting Garden are rare or endangered varieties which are threatened by the loss of small-scale farmlands or the shift to monoculture agricultural production. Industrial farming privileges only a handful of plants which exhibit commercially desirable traits such as long shelf-life, large yields , sweet taste, and pest resistance. A number of breeds which have long been neglected, and which offer a more expansive and challenging taste spectrum, are included in The Tasting Garden. They provide flavours and textures which are normally inaccessible to all but a handful of expert cultivators.

In one corner is The Arboriculturist's Workshed, a diminutive folly or monument, which acknowledges the grand achievements and skills, in terms of both physical labour and intellect, of the men and women who created this diversity of fruit varieties.

The Tasting Garden is a hybrid - part orchard and part artwork.

The Garden is an artwork - the artwork is a garden.

In early 2008 The Tasting Garden was vandalised and the bronze fruits were stolen. Unfortunately the Garden is therefore closed at present.
Storey Gallery is currently working with Lancaster City Council to raise funds to restore The Tasting Garden. If you would like to donate to this fund please contact the Gallery.