Factory Garden
The Factory Garden’s multiple plantings make the Finlayson Area green and vivid.
You can experience the Factory Garden all year round
In the Finlayson Area plants and plantings spread out around the whole factory area. The Factory Garden keeps growing every year, and its goal is to increase nature’s diversity in an urban environment and teach how the ecosystem functions. You can explore the Factory Garden freely at your own pace all around the year.
Making the Finlayson Area green began from two pieces of art, a meadow on the rooftop (Circle of Life) and the greenhouse (Paradise Experiment) by Anni Rapinoja in the Finlayson Art Area in 2020. Increasing nature’s diversity is the most important goal of the Factory Garden’s designer and implementer, the head gardener Santeri Urhonen. In the area, there is a diverse ecosystem living and breathing where each insect and plant have their place.
The Factory Garden now has already over 200 different plant species. In summer 2023, a process for enriching the diversity of the plants started by cultivating perennial plants in the Finlayson Area. This way it is possible to add more of such plants in the area that are difficult to get from the nursery gardens. During summers, there have been both live benches and live pots. However, these green elements are not the most amazing thing to see here, but the area’s ever developing ecosystem. Now that the area has been made greener for a few years, the plants are flourishing side by side in perfect harmony.
Factory Garden is also a home for bees. Korpikuusikon Hunaja delivered four beehives to Factory Garden at Café & Bar KATTO 2020. During the summer there’s 20 000 bees buzzing in their hives. Bees’ important job is to pollinate the flowers at the roof, but also within a few kilometer radius from the Finlayson Area. Beehives produce 60–80 kilograms of honey per year.
The Factory Garden is for enjoying the ecosystem
All sights in the Factory Garden are designed to prosper regardless of the weather. This does not, however, mean that the rooftop meadow would flourish after a long drought or that the star magnolia continues to bloom after a sudden cold spell in spring. Every plant has its moment and when it’s over, the plant will start to wait for the next moment.
The focus of the Factory Garden is not so much on individual plants but on the ecosystem they create and which tells countless of stories from the past year. A queen bumblebee that woke up from her winter sleep finds her first meal in a blooming widow’s mite, during the heatwave a withered clustered bellflower works as a nest for a cross spider, and a ladybird goes into hibernation in the soil softened by a dandelion.
