Gardening, like cooking, has never held much attraction for me. I enjoy the end result but assertions about their therapeutic and remedial qualities have frankly always left me cold. So a whole museum dedicated to garden history, with a large collection of tools at its heart, was going to have to work hard to win me over.
The permanent display at London's Garden Museum is divided into tools and the people that used them. You may think that one trowel is pretty much like another and that a spade is first and foremost a spade. How wrong you would be.
The whole business of creating gardens and cultivating flowers and plants has brought with it a wide range of implements with many varied and sometimes unusual uses.
Take for example the Tudor thumb pot - bet you can't guess its application from its name - but it's one of the earliest forms of watering can. What about that rather elegant slender glass vessel - a vase surely? Actually it's a cucumber straightener - which seems obvious once you've read the label. The dibber (used to plant seeds) will be familiar to modern gardeners, but how many would recognise an asparagus knife or grape scissors?
The museum is constantly on the look out for quirky and interesting objects at auction. The acquisition budget is about £3,000 a year, which doesn't go far, especially as collecting in this area has recently become more popular.
And contemporary objects have also been added. A Tony Blair gnome was recently purchased for the collection and a trowel and fork designed by the English sculptor Tony Cragg as part of Tate's collaboration with Homebase in 1999 have also been bought.
But at least half the new acquisitions each year are from donations. It is not unusual for people to wander into the museum, see something on display and then mention that they have similar objects in their garden shed.
It was this aspect of the collection that inspired Lisa Cheung, the museum's first artist in residence. Cheung focused her work on the people who have given items to the museum such as Tony Elphick who donated a large collection of objects and ephemera from his family horticultural business. Among them is a colourful display of seed catalogues and exhibitors' badges from the flower shows organised by the company.
It is fascinating to read and hear (there was an audio guide to the exhibition) the reasons for collecting and the hidden stories of the donated objects. A vivid display of cigarette cards depicting flowers comes alive when you read that the collector, Charles Gwynda Jones, was given them in payment for singing to the returning troops in the first world war.
Cheung's exhibition has just closed, but this month a new temporary exhibition opens that brings together a number of artists to look at the work of the two Tradescants, the famous plantsmen who are buried in the churchyard adjoining the museum. Ten artists working in a variety of media will reinterpret Tradescant's Ark - the cabinet of curiosities compiled by father and son and opened as a public museum in Lambeth in the 1620s.
Their collection subsequently went to Elias Ashmole and was used to set up the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This exhibition will bring back pieces from the original cabinet from the Ashmolean and the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, mixing museum objects with contemporary art.
The museum itself has an interesting history. In 1977 the church that now houses the collection was derelict and earmarked for demolition. The roof was half off, the windows boarded up and its only use was as a dwelling place for down and outs.
Then along came Rosemary Nicholson, who happened to be looking for the Tradescant family tomb. Horrified by the prospect of the demolition and fearing for the future of the churchyard, she started a trust to set up a museum of garden history and after much fundraising and renovation the museum opened.
Up until a few years ago, it was doing well with more than 40,000 visitors a year, but a drop in tourist numbers has hit the museum hard and last year it struggled to get 17,000 through the door.
Concerns about its financial future prompted a strategic review that made a number of recommendations including changing the name to the more direct and less unwieldy Garden Museum. First up though is a five-year business plan that will be written by the new chief executive, who should be in post by late summer.
Let's hope a central part of this plan will be a continued concentration on the collections that managed to firmly worm their way into my affection.
The permanent display at London's Garden Museum is divided into tools and the people that used them. You may think that one trowel is pretty much like another and that a spade is first and foremost a spade. How wrong you would be.
The whole business of creating gardens and cultivating flowers and plants has brought with it a wide range of implements with many varied and sometimes unusual uses.
Take for example the Tudor thumb pot - bet you can't guess its application from its name - but it's one of the earliest forms of watering can. What about that rather elegant slender glass vessel - a vase surely? Actually it's a cucumber straightener - which seems obvious once you've read the label. The dibber (used to plant seeds) will be familiar to modern gardeners, but how many would recognise an asparagus knife or grape scissors?
The museum is constantly on the look out for quirky and interesting objects at auction. The acquisition budget is about £3,000 a year, which doesn't go far, especially as collecting in this area has recently become more popular.
And contemporary objects have also been added. A Tony Blair gnome was recently purchased for the collection and a trowel and fork designed by the English sculptor Tony Cragg as part of Tate's collaboration with Homebase in 1999 have also been bought.
But at least half the new acquisitions each year are from donations. It is not unusual for people to wander into the museum, see something on display and then mention that they have similar objects in their garden shed.
It was this aspect of the collection that inspired Lisa Cheung, the museum's first artist in residence. Cheung focused her work on the people who have given items to the museum such as Tony Elphick who donated a large collection of objects and ephemera from his family horticultural business. Among them is a colourful display of seed catalogues and exhibitors' badges from the flower shows organised by the company.
It is fascinating to read and hear (there was an audio guide to the exhibition) the reasons for collecting and the hidden stories of the donated objects. A vivid display of cigarette cards depicting flowers comes alive when you read that the collector, Charles Gwynda Jones, was given them in payment for singing to the returning troops in the first world war.
Cheung's exhibition has just closed, but this month a new temporary exhibition opens that brings together a number of artists to look at the work of the two Tradescants, the famous plantsmen who are buried in the churchyard adjoining the museum. Ten artists working in a variety of media will reinterpret Tradescant's Ark - the cabinet of curiosities compiled by father and son and opened as a public museum in Lambeth in the 1620s.
Their collection subsequently went to Elias Ashmole and was used to set up the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This exhibition will bring back pieces from the original cabinet from the Ashmolean and the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, mixing museum objects with contemporary art.
The museum itself has an interesting history. In 1977 the church that now houses the collection was derelict and earmarked for demolition. The roof was half off, the windows boarded up and its only use was as a dwelling place for down and outs.
Then along came Rosemary Nicholson, who happened to be looking for the Tradescant family tomb. Horrified by the prospect of the demolition and fearing for the future of the churchyard, she started a trust to set up a museum of garden history and after much fundraising and renovation the museum opened.
Up until a few years ago, it was doing well with more than 40,000 visitors a year, but a drop in tourist numbers has hit the museum hard and last year it struggled to get 17,000 through the door.
Concerns about its financial future prompted a strategic review that made a number of recommendations including changing the name to the more direct and less unwieldy Garden Museum. First up though is a five-year business plan that will be written by the new chief executive, who should be in post by late summer.
Let's hope a central part of this plan will be a continued concentration on the collections that managed to firmly worm their way into my affection.
