The community garden of Dr. Guislain Museum and the Bloemekeswijk is once again looking its very best this year.
Tomatoes, aubergines, pumpkins, raspberries, (hot!) peppers, thyme, sage, mint, dahlias, cornflowers and even melons: the garden is thriving in Guislain soil.
Come and enjoy the harvest – the result of a wonderful collaboration between the museum, the neighbourhood and the hospital, under the watchful eye of gardener Eline.
On World Mental Health Day, we come together to celebrate, raise a glass and, of course, taste the harvest.
PROGRAMME
Saturday 10 October from 1 pm in the community garden
Drop in freely, no registration required, all activities and food are free.
ALL DAY
Tasting
Sample the savoury herbal sandwiches and fresh pumpkin soup. There is apple juice from the Guislain orchard and lemonade made from produce from our own garden. Create your own blend and enter for a chance to win a prize!
Walk around the site
Discover the story behind Hospice Guislain – the oldest psychiatric institution in Belgium – on a route through historic courtyards, gardens and buildings.
Fun for children
Obstacle course, witch’s kitchen and botanical colouring with Dodoens’ Cleureboeck
WORKSHOPS
Build birdhouses & insect hotels
Bake rolls with Marieke
Creative planting
Zen foot-bath ritual
Win a prize for the perfect lemonade
Create your own best lemonade, and who knows – your lemonade might be sold in the museum café!
Mark your calendars!
The new exhibition Sottobosco opens on 24.10.2026: in the shadows of tall trees.
If you only look at the treetops, you’ll miss what it’s all about.
Beneath the canopy lies a world of fungi, insects, flowers and other inhabitants of the forest floor. Messy, fragile and indispensable. In the 17th century, the Dutch artist Otto Marseus van Schrieck depicted this hidden world for the first time using a new genre: Sottobosco, the forest-floor still life. It is not the spectacular that takes centre stage, but what usually goes unnoticed.
For this exhibition, Wit.h is inviting artists from home and abroad to make the forest floor visible once again. Artists who often work away from the limelight. Some operate on the fringes of what is regarded as normal or taken for granted. Not out of the picture, but out of frame.
Sottobosco invites you to take a closer look. At hidden lives, unexpected connections and new ways of working together. For what makes a forest grow rarely sees the full light of day. Often, the greatest strength is hidden in the shadows.