Wesley Shaw, Horniman Museum and Gardens, London
When he sought out pastures new at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in south London six years ago, Wesley Shaw assumed his job would mainly be the maintenance of the green and pleasant land around the institution.
Displays have included a pollinator-friendly bed with a depiction of a dissected flower for the Horniman’s 2015 Plantastic interactive show, a cacti garden to mirror the Extremes exhibition in 2014 and the wheel of 12 shades of bedding plants to tie in with 2018’s Colour: The Rainbow Revealed.
The museum’s current exhibition is Brick Wonders (until 27 October), in which half a million pieces of Lego have been assembled to recreate wonders of the world. Outside, Shaw and his team have built on that theme in the 80-year-old Sunken Garden (left).
“In February, we planted a six-colour scheme – featuring lobelia, carex, petunias and marigolds – in blocks to look like Lego,” says Shaw, who adds that a garden’s sustainability is just as important as its look. “All our exhibition-related ideas have to last through changing seasons. We can’t throw water around like we used to. The rest of the garden has to look as good as the specific displays, so we try to use things that don’t need hours of irrigating and weeding daily.”
Last year, to mark the opening of the Horniman’s permanent world gallery of anthropology, Shaw and his team repurposed an area where fruit and vegetables were traditionally grown.
The secret, he adds, was the removal of 150mm of topsoil and planting into a layer of gravel mulch. “As a horticulturalist, I was brought up to believe you shouldn’t do such things, but it was based on years of research and has been a revelation,” he says.
Juliet Hodgkiss, St Fagans National Museum of History, Cardiff
Another collection of diverse gardens – and their associated historic buildings – is spread across 100 acres of the open-air St Fagans National Museum of History on the outskirts of Cardiff.
“We have vegetable plots and orchards alongside the re-erected buildings, dating from a 16th-century farmhouse garden to a 1950s prefab one,” says senior garden conservator Juliet Hodgkiss, whose job is to preserve the plants and the skills used to tend them.
“Everyone on our small team has to have a huge range of knowledge to look after all the different types. We’re constantly busy with soil preparation and sowing in spring, weeding, watering and deadheading in summer, hedge-cutting in autumn and pruning in winter. With a site as large as this, even walking from garden to garden takes a lot of time.”
The formal gardens surrounding St Fagans Castle have an early-1900s look with herbaceous borders, wall-trained fruit, trees and shrubs, encouraging a multisensory appreciation of nature, says Hodgkiss. “Plants are chosen for their shape, colour, scent, how they move in a breeze and the texture of the foliage. Water features add a calming effect.”
In the gardens of the re-erected buildings, historical accuracy is the main aim. “We have, for example, a late 18th-century farm labourer’s cottage and its garden has raised beds, constructed using archaeological evidence from the area,” Hodgkiss says. “These would have allowed the inhabitants to grow crops on damp ground, while herbs were grown to flavour food and to use as medicine.”
Fiona Dennis, Charleston, East Sussex
The epitome of the picture-book artist garden is Charleston, the country retreat of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their bohemian Bloomsbury household near Lewes in east Sussex. Its head gardener, Fiona Dennis (left), is hard at work restoring the grounds to how the artist community created them during the interwar years.
“The garden was last restored in 1987, but historic gardening work has become more academic over the past 30 years,” says Dennis. “Back then, there was talk about the spirit of Charleston, whereas I’m interested in what was actually there. I’ve scanned all the paintings to pin down the right plants in all the right places.
“It’s not good enough to say ‘Crocosmia should be here’ and then plant Crocosmia Lucifer, because that’s a modern variety and is four times taller than the original.”
A Duncan Grant painting hanging in the Tate revealed, for example, that a border Dennis found filled with plants popular in the 1970s had, in fact, been a vision of pinks and wallflowers back in the 1930s.
Dennis has also based her work on accounts from old photographs. “They are in black and white so I’ve used my horticultural experience to achieve the right ‘overflowing’ look,” she says.
One scribbling by Grant listed the plants he ordered from a catalogue. Dennis tracked down one of the same 1930s vintage to ensure she was planting the same seeds. “It’s a painter’s garden,” she says. “They chose the colours, which were arranged architecturally by their gardeners.”
The Bloomsbury set treated the garden as an outside room because, as conscientious objectors of a certain class, they didn’t wander around the town, says Dennis.
Gregory Leeson, Historic Royal Palaces
Historical herbs and their remedial associations are a feature of a colourful display in the walls of the Tower of London, where a faithful facsimile of an apothecary garden developed by one of the fortress’s most famous residents has been created.
Unlike many unfortunates who ended up in the tower, Sir Walter Raleigh – the former royal favourite, adventurer and enthusiastic pipe smoker – was allowed to live something of a charmed life during his three spells of incarceration. His family were there with him and he used the courtyard outside his cell in the infamous Bloody Tower to grow plants from the “new world” and experiment with ingredients in search of an elixir of life.
“It all provides strong fragrances, which complement the displays, alongside the sound effects and films visitors can experience when visiting Raleigh’s home from home,” says Leeson, whose main responsibilities include the 65 acres of formal gardens at Hampton Court Palace, London, where history is regularly brought to life through spectacular flower shows.
Last year’s suffragette celebrations, for example, were marked with the colours of the movement’s emblem – purple, green and white – represented in Victorian carpet bedding appropriate to the era. And in 2020, the gardens will host a reimagining of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to mark the 500th anniversary of the summit between Henry VIII and Francis I of France near Calais.
“There will be sculptural representations of the two kings and we’re going to try to replicate the colours of the glorious tents in the bedding,” says Leeson.
Taking inspiration from the British School painting of the event, which hangs in Hampton Court’s Wolsey Room, Leeson’s team will also be depicting its sporting activities. “We will be representing the dragon that flies across the top left corner of the painting,” says Leeson, who believes that increasing visitor numbers to places such as Hampton Court are the result of the decline of public parks in towns and cities.
“With council funding cuts, some parks are becoming run down,” he says. “More and more people are choosing to come to gardens like ours because they are maintained and welcoming.”
Leeson is keen to secure the future of historical landscapes by nurturing the next generation of garden enthusiasts to be prepared for all eventualities.
“Last summer was awful – we had box blight and box moth, which we’re still treating,” he says. “The next two or three decades will see a huge variation in flora as the climate changes. We have to focus on what we can do to mitigate those issues.”
Michael Jack, Broughton House & Garden, Kirkcudbright, Scotland
Adapting to weather conditions is a key skill of a horticulturalist. Take, for example, Broughton House & Garden in Kirkcudbright, south-west Scotland, where gardener Michael Jack is prepared for anything nature can throw at him.
“Being close to the Dee Estuary and Solway coast, the garden has a maritime climate and we enjoy the warming influences of the Gulf Stream,” he says. “It is mild with few frosts and generally warm and temperate, but there’s significant rainfall throughout the year, even in the warmest months of summer. During particularly wet periods it is often not possible to work the ground for fear of damaging the soil structure.”
Kirkcudbright is an old artists’ colony and Broughton House is the former home of the Scottish painter and collector EA Hornel, who created the Japanese-influenced garden.
“It is laid out in a series of ‘rooms’ connected by narrow winding paths and is full of colour with mature apple trees and an Edwardian glasshouse with old pelargonium varieties, a fruit and vegetable garden, and stone features including sundials and architectural fragments,” says Jack.
As well as general maintenance, his to-do list over the summer includes renovating one of the herbaceous borders and planning an upgrade to the paths to improve accessibility for the gardeners and visitors.
When he sought out pastures new at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in south London six years ago, Wesley Shaw assumed his job would mainly be the maintenance of the green and pleasant land around the institution.
“Having spent the previous 12 years at Kew, where everything revolved around the plants, I thought I’d be taking a back seat here as the focus would be on the museum and its collections,” says Shaw, the Horniman’s head of horticulture.
“But there were ambitious plans to link the gardens thematically with what was happening in the museum. So we’ve been able to do some cool displays that connect with exhibitions.”
Displays have included a pollinator-friendly bed with a depiction of a dissected flower for the Horniman’s 2015 Plantastic interactive show, a cacti garden to mirror the Extremes exhibition in 2014 and the wheel of 12 shades of bedding plants to tie in with 2018’s Colour: The Rainbow Revealed.
The museum’s current exhibition is Brick Wonders (until 27 October), in which half a million pieces of Lego have been assembled to recreate wonders of the world. Outside, Shaw and his team have built on that theme in the 80-year-old Sunken Garden (left).
“In February, we planted a six-colour scheme – featuring lobelia, carex, petunias and marigolds – in blocks to look like Lego,” says Shaw, who adds that a garden’s sustainability is just as important as its look. “All our exhibition-related ideas have to last through changing seasons. We can’t throw water around like we used to. The rest of the garden has to look as good as the specific displays, so we try to use things that don’t need hours of irrigating and weeding daily.”
Last year, to mark the opening of the Horniman’s permanent world gallery of anthropology, Shaw and his team repurposed an area where fruit and vegetables were traditionally grown.
“To complement the anthropology theme, we created a scheme representing grassland habitats and their use by indigenous peoples,” says Shaw, who redeveloped the site with the help of the ecology expert James Hitchmough.“It not only links with the gallery, but also provides year-round colour and is easy to maintain.
“During last year’s cruel summer, I had to water it just two or three times and that was purely to introduce new plants.” The secret, he adds, was the removal of 150mm of topsoil and planting into a layer of gravel mulch. “As a horticulturalist, I was brought up to believe you shouldn’t do such things, but it was based on years of research and has been a revelation,” he says.
Juliet Hodgkiss, St Fagans National Museum of History, Cardiff
Another collection of diverse gardens – and their associated historic buildings – is spread across 100 acres of the open-air St Fagans National Museum of History on the outskirts of Cardiff.
“We have vegetable plots and orchards alongside the re-erected buildings, dating from a 16th-century farmhouse garden to a 1950s prefab one,” says senior garden conservator Juliet Hodgkiss, whose job is to preserve the plants and the skills used to tend them.
“Everyone on our small team has to have a huge range of knowledge to look after all the different types. We’re constantly busy with soil preparation and sowing in spring, weeding, watering and deadheading in summer, hedge-cutting in autumn and pruning in winter. With a site as large as this, even walking from garden to garden takes a lot of time.”
The formal gardens surrounding St Fagans Castle have an early-1900s look with herbaceous borders, wall-trained fruit, trees and shrubs, encouraging a multisensory appreciation of nature, says Hodgkiss. “Plants are chosen for their shape, colour, scent, how they move in a breeze and the texture of the foliage. Water features add a calming effect.”
In the gardens of the re-erected buildings, historical accuracy is the main aim. “We have, for example, a late 18th-century farm labourer’s cottage and its garden has raised beds, constructed using archaeological evidence from the area,” Hodgkiss says. “These would have allowed the inhabitants to grow crops on damp ground, while herbs were grown to flavour food and to use as medicine.”
Fiona Dennis, Charleston, East Sussex
The epitome of the picture-book artist garden is Charleston, the country retreat of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their bohemian Bloomsbury household near Lewes in east Sussex. Its head gardener, Fiona Dennis (left), is hard at work restoring the grounds to how the artist community created them during the interwar years.
“The garden was last restored in 1987, but historic gardening work has become more academic over the past 30 years,” says Dennis. “Back then, there was talk about the spirit of Charleston, whereas I’m interested in what was actually there. I’ve scanned all the paintings to pin down the right plants in all the right places.
“It’s not good enough to say ‘Crocosmia should be here’ and then plant Crocosmia Lucifer, because that’s a modern variety and is four times taller than the original.”
A Duncan Grant painting hanging in the Tate revealed, for example, that a border Dennis found filled with plants popular in the 1970s had, in fact, been a vision of pinks and wallflowers back in the 1930s.
Dennis has also based her work on accounts from old photographs. “They are in black and white so I’ve used my horticultural experience to achieve the right ‘overflowing’ look,” she says.
One scribbling by Grant listed the plants he ordered from a catalogue. Dennis tracked down one of the same 1930s vintage to ensure she was planting the same seeds. “It’s a painter’s garden,” she says. “They chose the colours, which were arranged architecturally by their gardeners.”
The Bloomsbury set treated the garden as an outside room because, as conscientious objectors of a certain class, they didn’t wander around the town, says Dennis.
Gregory Leeson, Historic Royal Palaces
Historical herbs and their remedial associations are a feature of a colourful display in the walls of the Tower of London, where a faithful facsimile of an apothecary garden developed by one of the fortress’s most famous residents has been created.
Unlike many unfortunates who ended up in the tower, Sir Walter Raleigh – the former royal favourite, adventurer and enthusiastic pipe smoker – was allowed to live something of a charmed life during his three spells of incarceration. His family were there with him and he used the courtyard outside his cell in the infamous Bloody Tower to grow plants from the “new world” and experiment with ingredients in search of an elixir of life.
“We based our new version of the garden on accounts from 1612, when Queen Anne asked Raleigh to prepare a cordial to help the seriously ill Prince of Wales,” says Gregory Leeson, the gardens and estates horticultural manager for Historic Royal Palaces.
“Raleigh became well known for the herbal medicines he developed, which he made primarily because he was a hypochondriac. In the courtyard, we have raised planters with the cordial plants in the centre, and this summer we’re surrounding them with the citrus fruits he grew.
“It all provides strong fragrances, which complement the displays, alongside the sound effects and films visitors can experience when visiting Raleigh’s home from home,” says Leeson, whose main responsibilities include the 65 acres of formal gardens at Hampton Court Palace, London, where history is regularly brought to life through spectacular flower shows.
Last year’s suffragette celebrations, for example, were marked with the colours of the movement’s emblem – purple, green and white – represented in Victorian carpet bedding appropriate to the era. And in 2020, the gardens will host a reimagining of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to mark the 500th anniversary of the summit between Henry VIII and Francis I of France near Calais.
“There will be sculptural representations of the two kings and we’re going to try to replicate the colours of the glorious tents in the bedding,” says Leeson.
Taking inspiration from the British School painting of the event, which hangs in Hampton Court’s Wolsey Room, Leeson’s team will also be depicting its sporting activities. “We will be representing the dragon that flies across the top left corner of the painting,” says Leeson, who believes that increasing visitor numbers to places such as Hampton Court are the result of the decline of public parks in towns and cities.
“With council funding cuts, some parks are becoming run down,” he says. “More and more people are choosing to come to gardens like ours because they are maintained and welcoming.”
Leeson is keen to secure the future of historical landscapes by nurturing the next generation of garden enthusiasts to be prepared for all eventualities.
“Last summer was awful – we had box blight and box moth, which we’re still treating,” he says. “The next two or three decades will see a huge variation in flora as the climate changes. We have to focus on what we can do to mitigate those issues.”
Michael Jack, Broughton House & Garden, Kirkcudbright, Scotland
Adapting to weather conditions is a key skill of a horticulturalist. Take, for example, Broughton House & Garden in Kirkcudbright, south-west Scotland, where gardener Michael Jack is prepared for anything nature can throw at him.
“Being close to the Dee Estuary and Solway coast, the garden has a maritime climate and we enjoy the warming influences of the Gulf Stream,” he says. “It is mild with few frosts and generally warm and temperate, but there’s significant rainfall throughout the year, even in the warmest months of summer. During particularly wet periods it is often not possible to work the ground for fear of damaging the soil structure.”
Kirkcudbright is an old artists’ colony and Broughton House is the former home of the Scottish painter and collector EA Hornel, who created the Japanese-influenced garden.
“It is laid out in a series of ‘rooms’ connected by narrow winding paths and is full of colour with mature apple trees and an Edwardian glasshouse with old pelargonium varieties, a fruit and vegetable garden, and stone features including sundials and architectural fragments,” says Jack.
As well as general maintenance, his to-do list over the summer includes renovating one of the herbaceous borders and planning an upgrade to the paths to improve accessibility for the gardeners and visitors.
John Holt is a freelance journalist. A session on museum gardens will take place at the Museums Association Conference in Brighton, 3-5 October