28 Geodesic Domes

I first spotted them on a visit to The Eden Project - a ‘build your own dome’ kit to take home with you. It was very tempting. I have been looking for interesting ideas on what to use for dedicated growing spaces for a while, and these looked like a candidate.

My selection criteria are a bit strange in this case. It needs to be portable and easily dismantled / re-built during the studio construction phase of the project. It needs to be open to the elements in summer but with some protection from frost in the winter. It needs to be able to withstand the strong winds we sometimes get coming off the Dee Estuary. And it definitely needs to be decorative. These geodesic domes fit the bill perfectly.

The concept is very simple and explained well on the Build with Hubs website. You use a series of flexible hubs to link sticks + connectors of two different lengths together to create concentric levels of the dome. The height increases as you add each layer. By varying the length of sticks used, you can create different sized domes.

I have chosen to use hazel sticks because they will work best with the rustic design of the walled garden. Looking online many other materials like broom handles, metal poles and timber slats have all been used. You screw a ball connector into each end of the stick and can easily slot them into the hubs. You can buy the dome hub and connector kit online with very good instructions on how to do it.

You do need 2 people to manage the structure, so my niece Vicky helped out. This is a 2.4m dome and it took us 1 hour on a sunny Saturday afternoon to put it up and secure it in place. The build is amazingly easy and the dome looks great, perfect for that part of the garden.

It fits in really well. Almost immediately the garden birds started using it as a perch on their way through the garden and I recently saw a kestrel resting there. This dome will be used as a growing space for a collection of South African proteas, but I plan to get a larger one to be used as a fruit cage.

Note 1: Thanks to Build with Hubs for the use of their diagrams for this article Their website is a treasure trove of information about these domes and includes a shop and a gallery of examples of how it can be used.

Note 2: The #domedone hashtag on Instagram has some great examples of how people have used these geodesic domes.