The Grow Dome is a community growing installation combining sustainable food growing, creative collaboration, and public engagement. Originally developed by CFINE in 2020, it has become a vibrant demonstration of biophilic design and community innovation, now permanently housed at the James Hutton Institute’s Hutton Hub.
Rebecca Dun, CFINE’s Community Growing Development Worker helped to coordinate the move of the Grow Dome to the James Hutton Institute. Below is a blog post from Rebecca discussing the decision behind the move.
You can find out more about the Grow Dome here!
In January I coordinated the build of the ‘Grow Dome’ - an urban vertical garden - at the James Hutton Institute (JHI) in Aberdeen. After existing in various forms and locations since 2020, we’re delighted that it has found its permanent home JHI.
Choosing the location
In 2025, myself and some of my colleagues at CFINE spent time identifying the best candidate to provide a long-term home for the Grow Dome. To do this, we created a series of questions for organisations interested in ‘adopting’ the Grow Dome which ranged from the practical - where would it be housed? can you care for it long term? - to the reflective - would the location be a suitable future storyteller for the Grow Dome’s legacy?
I am over the moon about our final decision, which was to donate the Grow Dome to the James Hutton Institute (JHI) who provide a highly visible location in their brand-new Hutton Hub Café, which will support public engagement with the growing structure.
It’s not only the visibility that made JHI the right fit though! We were impressed that their in-house plant scientists would plan what to plant, integrating elements from their collections. Whilst their research is conducted in controlled environments, some examples of their work can be displayed in the public space that the Grow Dome inhabits and provide a valuable educational site for community group and school visits.
Overseeing the build
So that’s how, in the middle of a wet, wild and windy January, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day coordinating the rebuild of the Grow Dome in its new home.
Prof Lee-Ann Sutherland, Director of International Land Use Study Centre at JHI, has been my main contact in this scheme to relocate the Grow Dome. She gathered a team of people for the construction day, and we all donned our work gloves and mallets!
I provided instruction and oversight on the build, making use of my experience with the structure. It was a boost to my self-confidence to coordinate this successfully, with the help of volunteer, Alex Forbes, who’d been there to help with the original build in 2022, and on subsequent builds.
Open to the public – a multi-sensory experience!
It’s great that the Grow Dome is in a location where it will be looked after by some of the best in their field, and with interesting species you may not see elsewhere. The installation will benefit from CFINE’s community links, rooted in Aberdeen’s priority communities. We hope it will become the destination for many educational visits from schools and community groups, including CFINE’s gardening project participants.
This ties perfectly into what JHI are imagining for the new Hutton Hub:
“Our new Hutton Hub is a capacity building and engagement centre, specifically designed to help us do more engagement with schools and community groups. Our open science café is open to the public.” — Prof Lee-Ann Sutherland, Director of International Land Use Study Centre, JHI
When the Grow Dome was first installed, at the Aberdeen Performing Arts Wonderland Festival in 2022, I wrote and recorded 4 new songs which form one cohesive soundscape that visitors heard as they wandered around and inside the vertical garden.
To experience the Grow Dome as the interactive and multi-sensory experience it’s designed to be, JHI are installing a sign with a QR code to the soundscape I created. It’s a huge privilege to be credited for my work in this way!
If you’re planning to visit the Grow Dome, I recommend bringing your headphones to listen to the soundscape whilst seated inside this wee green oasis, surrounded by plants.
Next steps: planting – and launching! – the Grow Dome
While we had to turn down submissions of other organisations who were interested in adopting the Grow Dome, they will be invited, alongside stakeholders and community garden groups, to a launch event at JHI, to mark the installation of the Grow Dome. But first off, the JHI plant scientists still need to get their hands on this unique vertical garden!
“Its going to be a fun challenge for our plant scientists to determine which of our varietals will grow well together (some require more or less water, light etc, so there will be some experimentation). ” — Prof Lee-Ann Sutherland, Director of International Land Use Study Centre, JHI
JHI have started exploring the necessary lighting and irrigation required to support the Grow Dome, and plan on using produce harvested from the Grow Dome in their Hutton Hub café. They have agreed to share their findings with us at CFINE, where we’ll keep a record of what works well, what doesn’t, and how the produce is used.
Every deconstruction and rebuild of the Grow Dome is tiring, and after the hard day’s work, we all agreed that we hope it is now up for good!
We at CFINE are looking forward to its new chapter housed in the innovative new Hutton Hub, where visitors can also take in not only their lunch at the café but also a state of the art immersion suite and VR headsets!
You can see the Grow Dome any time the Hutton Hub café is open, but for enquiries about booking an educational visit, visit https://www.cfine.org/grow-dome.
Fun fact:
The artist Craig Barrowman cut the pieces to make the Grow Dome using a CNC Machine and the size specifications provided by Space 10’s open source ‘Growroom’ design.
Craig constructed an adorable little prototype about 1% of the size of the final product and gifted it to me! This still holds pride of place on my windowsill.
