Brilliantly acted by Anita Reynolds and Robbie O’Neill, and directed by John Young, it is funny and concerning and threatening and hopeful. I love a two-hander where the script and the actors are given space to do their best work - although I loved the detail in Ceci Calf’s set design (right down to the bottle of Jif on the draining board), and there’s an unexpected bit of staging that I won’t spoil. It’s at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool until Saturday 23 May. Tickets here.

This is a free post for everyone but if you do decide to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber then you will receive lots of extra content including a monthly guide to the best of what’s on in Liverpool, Manchester and across the North West, as well as Meet the Creator features, curators’ picks of 5 things to see in their venue and the Stored Honey podcast. Either way - thank you for reading.

We should be careful what we say

It’s no secret in Liverpool that many of the plants we enjoy in our gardens were brought here from abroad. The city’s famous Botanic Collection - established by the Victorians and controversially scattered to different locations by the Militants in the 1980s - was made up of specimens collected abroad including from the Caribbean, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and China.

And Sefton Park Palm House, which we take such pride in, displays statues of pioneers in botanical study alongside those of historical explorers.

As part of a programme of events marking its 130th anniversary, the Palm House is acknowledging its problematic connections through a talk by biodiversity artist Andrea Ku: Decolonising the Colonised - The Journey of the Non-Native Plants. As well as considering how in taking plants from the colonies botanists stripped them of their indigenous identity, she is interested in the way we describe so-called “non-native” plants today.

No effort was made to preserve plants’ original, indigenous names - they were given standardised Latin names or were named after the people who “discovered” them - or after their family members.

Ku says: “You’ll see some plants with a woman’s name after it, and they’ve disregarded the indigenous species and thought, ‘I’ll name it after my wife.’ Or they named them after each other .

“They brought the plants back here because it showed power and wealth - ‘Look at us - we can travel around the world and collect all these plants and animals’.”

An example is the Butterfly Bush, with its insect-attracting flowers, which has the official name Buddleja Davidii - the first part of which is after English botanist Rev Adam Buddle and the second is for the French missionary and explorer Father Armand David, who was the first European to report its existence. In China, according to the EPPO Global Database, it is called the more poetic “dà yè zuì yú cǎo” or “large-leaf drunken fish grass”.

After an introductory talk, Ku will guide visitors around the Palm House, looking at some of the plants in its collection and showing some “invasive” samples she has brought along. These could include floating pennywort, which she collects in the Litherland to Bootle stretch of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

She says: “It spreads very quickly and it chokes out a lot of the water and oxygen so the fish can’t get water. It takes over around and stops other species from growing. But it’s a tough subject because it does do all of those bad things as it’s trying to survive.”

“If you go to the garden centre and you find an echinacea, you wouldn’t say, ‘It’s not native’. You’d be like, ‘That’s lovely. I’ll have that.”

Ku points out some of the problematic everyday language used to describe plants and insects, and how it parallels racist descriptions of people. Referring to a plant as “non-native” and “invasive” might seem innocuous to some, but we saw how linking the Covid-19 pandemic to China caused an increase in racist incidents against Chinese and East Asian communities in the UK and US.

“In Liverpool, I noticed it - even in Sefton Park, people shouting stuff, in Asda and in town,” says Ku, who is dual heritage - her dad is Hong Kong and her mum is from Prescot.

The term “non-native” tends only to used to describe invasive plant species such as Japanese Knotweed, but does not appear on the labels of plants such as rhododendrons sold in garden centres.

“If you go to the garden centre and you find an echinacea, you wouldn’t say, ‘It’s not native’. You’d be like, ‘That’s lovely. I’ll have that.” Ku says.

“There’s a case of an experiment in South America where a researcher wanted to create the perfect strain of honeybee, so they got a European queen bee, and male drones from Africa. What they were after was the calmness of the European bee mixed with the ‘good’ traits from the African honeybee, which were hard working but defensive.

“But it turned out these bees were very, very defensive. So they called them ‘Africanised’ because they were very defensive and stinging people.”

Ku hopes her talk will help people be more aware of language used around non-native species, and “why we’re kind of pushed to use certain language around non-native and especially invasive plants. If something’s not native, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

Andrea Ku’s will present her talk Decolonising the Colonised - The Journey of the Non-Native Plants at Sefton Park Palm House on Thursday 21 May, 2pm and 6pm. Entry is free but you need to book in advance.

See your work featured in Stored Honey

If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event by sending details and an image to laura@lauracdavis.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A or if you don’t like filling in forms I can send you the questions via email.

In case you missed it

Opening this week

A display celebrating how a group of people changed the future of Sefton Park Palm House opened at Liverpool Central Library this week as part of the glasshouse’s 130th anniversary year.

Save It! documents the decline and dereliction of the Palm House from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the journey towards its restoration and reopening 25 years ago in 2001.

Featuring archive material from Liverpool Record Office, including photographs, fundraising material and personal stories, Save It! shows how the tenacity and generosity of the local community and core team of campaigners saved the building following years of damage and neglect. Ends Thursday 27 August.

Last chance to see

A major solo exhibition from Steve des Landes, the gallery’s artist-in-residence, closes at the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead, Wirral, this month. Loyalty includes new artwork created on site and more than 40 paintings from his recent practice focusing on representations of figures in the landscape. Ends Saturday 23 May.

One for all the family

Bluey, Bingo, Mum and Dad are back in Salford by popular demand in the Olivier Award-nominated live stage show Bluey’s Big Play. Featuring puppets and the original voices from the beloved TV series, it’s at Lowry from Friday 22 to Sunday 31 May 2026.

Thank you for reading the 178th edition of Stored Honey. I’m off now to read about the incredible pioneering art collectors and social reformers Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, from Wales, for a heritage project I’m involved in.

Have a great week,

Laura

Stored Honey is a member of the Independent Media Association, and adheres to its Code of Conduct.

And I have another Meet the Creator coming to paid subscribers’ inboxes this week - so look out for that or sign up to receive it.

This monthly guide is curated exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox along with regular Meet the Creator features and curator’s picks, you can subscribe using this button…

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I went to see it in the West End when I was about 14 thanks to a friend’s generous parents who took me on a school-arranged trip as their guest. I wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise. I was just the right age for the romance to hit me right in the stomach, but it was the staging that I could barely believe - a real helicopter! I was so cringeworthily obsessed that I did a presentation on it for an English Speaking Exam and made a clock in Design Technology lessons with the logo painted on it. Oh, and I had the double cassette of the soundtrack.

High stakes then - to watch it again more than 30 years later. Would I still love it? Yes I did, very much so. And yet, the themes and songs that hit home the hardest this time around were different to when I was 14. Instead of being caught up in the love story between Kim and Chris, I was drawn more to the character arc of Chris’ best friend John (played by Dominic Hartley-Harris), who is fully “angry young man” in the first half, violence simmering underneath leery hedonism in the Saigon brothel. Three years later, he is fighting for the “Bui Doi” (Dust of Life) children fathered by GIs, poorly treated because of their dual heritage. It left me thinking about how war leaves people on all sides broken, destroyed, unable to fully recover if they even make it through alive.

Sorry for the Sunday afternoon downer - I promise there’s some beautiful art coming your way below. But I’ll just add - and all reviews will no doubt start with this so I’ve definitely buried the lead - that it’s worth booking a ticket for Seann Miley Moore’s electric performance as The Engineer alone. He is fantastic.

This is a free post for everyone but if you do decide to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber then you will receive lots of extra content including a monthly guide to the best of what’s on in Liverpool, Manchester and across the North West, as well as Meet the Artist features, curators’ picks of 5 things to see in their venue and the Stored Honey podcast. Either way - thank you for reading.

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‘I’m a remarkable woman - always was’

May Morris wasn’t one to mince her words when it came to design: “A colour that is in itself beautiful may become absolutely atrocious by awkward handling.”

Clashing shades were “natural enem[ies]”, she wrote, emotively - as if good interior design were a matter of life or death instead of a way of making your home nicer to live in. But to her, the daughter of the great Arts and Crafts textile designer William Morris who took over his embroidery workshop at the age of just 23. it was, at the very least, a matter of her whole life.

Her extraordinary eye for colour is one of the overwhelming impressions of the Lady Lever’s new exhibition May Morris: Crafting a Legacy. The other is how astonishingly brilliant she was at so many different things.

Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of Decorative Art at National Museums Liverpool, says: “At one time, she was very much overshadowed by her father but exhibitions, recent research and publications are all seeking to put that right and give her the prominent place that she deserves because she was one of the most pioneering women artists of the Arts and Crafts movement.”

Emphasising this theme, Honeysuckle, a wallpaper design long mistakenly attributed to William Morris, features prominently - as a framed woodblock print from c.1883 and papering some of the gallery walls.

Slattery Clark continues: “She was not just an artist - but also very much an influential voice because she set up the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907, and sought to employ young women from less-privileged backgrounds.”

One of these was 14-year-old Ellen Wright, who she met during a visit to a school in Hammersmith,. Recognising her talent, she invited her to become an apprentice at the Morris & Co. embroidery workshop. Her sister Fanny later joined her - otherwise both would have likely ended up as domestic servants.

“Both these sisters remained with Morris & Co. for many years, and they went on to become teachers at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.,” says Slattery Clark. “That opportunity opened up a whole new world to them, gave them a career path, they could only have dreamed of.”

Unlike her father, Morris had been taught to embroider (by her mother and aunt) so she could make what she designed. On display are designs alongside their finished pieces so you can follow her working method.

The exhibition also traces the link between Morris and the Lady Lever’s own collection - not the perhaps more obvious but male-centred Pre-Raphaelite link (the Brotherhood’s founding members were regular visits to her childhood home, she and her sister were friends Edward Burne-Jones’ children, and their mother was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse and lover), but the influence of previous eras of design via a number of 17th-century English embroideries.

After her father’s death came Morris’ “most courageous, adventurous part of her career” as a freelance artist, designer and maker, says Slattery Clarke.

“No longer having to adhere to the Morris brand, she had complete freedom. She could make one-off pieces, and also turned her hand to jewellery-making, to metalwork.,” she says. “She was very well-published in her lifetime and was invited to tour the States, as part of a seven-month lecture program, delivering talks about historic jewellery, costume, the mask, pageantry.”

The challenge in putting together this exhibition was demonstrating all of Morris’ interests and accomplishments in what is quite a small space. Twenty-five core works were loaned by the William Morris Society, and there are also pieces from the V&A, National Museum Cardiff, Leicestershire Museums, the William Morris Gallery, Emery Walker Trust and a private collector.

As she once wrote to playwright George Bernard Shaw: “I’m a remarkable woman - always was, though none of you seemed to think so.”

May Morris: Crafting a Legacy is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until Sunday, 1 November.

See your work featured in Stored Honey

If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event by sending details and an image to laura@lauracdavis.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A or if you don’t like filling in forms I can send you the questions via email.

In case you missed it

Now booking

Award-winning actor Elaine Cassidy and Katherine Pearce will join the cast of Rory Mullarkey’s original play Even These Things, premiering at at the Royal Exchange in Manchester - 30 years after an IRA bomb devastated the heart of the city. Set across three moments in time - 1896, 1996 and 2026 - the play explores private and public histories, grief and love – and the making and re-making of the city.

The production will be completed by a community cast of 108 participants from across all 10 Greater Manchester boroughs, highlighting the profound impact that the events had on the Manchester community and placing the city’s people at the very centre of the story. Friday 15 May - Monday 15 June.

Thank you for reading the 176th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed this week’s edition then please tap the ❤️ button so that it gets shown to more people.

I’m off now to enjoy this beautiful sunshine.

Have a great week,

Laura

Stored Honey is a member of the Independent Media Association, and adheres to its Code of Conduct.

I’m currently experiencing that with paintings of curtains. In the last Stored Honey, I wrote about Lo…

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As always, the monthly guide only covers shows that are opening and closing this month - look back at previous guides (here are February’s and March’s) to find long-running exhibitions that are still on throughout April.

This monthly guide is curated exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox along with regular Meet the Creator features and curator’s picks, you can subscribe using this button…

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It was due to be open for the priv…

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This monthly guide is curated exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox along with regular Meet the Creator features and curator’s picks, you can subscribe using this button…

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I was particularly intrigued by how he began expressing his creativity through making art before he was grabbed by music - and he still uses visual descriptions like the “colour of the words” when talking about his songwriting.

The regular Meet the Creator feature is published exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe for £6 per month (£60 for an annual subscription) using this button…

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As all editions move behind a paywall three weeks after publication, these are usually only available t…

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I was really interested in what he has to say about envisioning the space he is creating work to be displayed in - something that perhaps comes out of his work as an art handler for galleries and a curator at Bridewell.

The regular Meet the Creator feature is published exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe for £6 per month (£60 for an annual subscription) using this button…

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I also have a trip across the Pennines to Inspired By… gallery to see North Yorkshire Open Studios’ first exhibition of the year as I’m helping them with their publicity, and am excited about meeting some of the artists in person and hearing more about their work. I’d also love to hear what you have on your must-see list for February - please comment below or reply if you’ve received this as an email. I read every message I get.

This monthly guide is curated exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox along with regular Meet the Creator features and curator’s picks, you can subscribe using this button…

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When she had a print sale before Christmas I couldn’t resist one of the jellies - there’s something seductively nostalgic about jellies even though I’ve actually never really liked eating them. They are almost ridiculously kitsch but are actually quite beautiful in the way the light shines through them like little jewels. One of the things I love about Joël’s paintings is how they appear so realistic that you can almost lift them off the picture and start indulging - but look again and you can’t miss the brushstrokes. Plus they are fun and we all need a bit more of that in our lives.

The regular Meet the Creator feature is published exclusively for paid members to thank them for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe for £6 per month (£60 for an annual subscription) using this button…

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A little gift from 2025 Laura to 2026 Laura. Unfortunately she did not take it upon herself to fill out a certain grant application form or take the pet rabbits for their six-month check-up, but you can’t have everything.

So here it is… my pick of exhibitions, theatre and other cultural treats to brighten up the dark days of January. What are you most looking forward to seeing?

This monthly guide is curated exclusively for paid members as a thank you for their support, which is needed to keep Stored Honey running. If you would like to join us and receive it straight to your inbox along with regular Meet the Creator features, curator’s picks and more, you can subscribe using this button…

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