Exhibitions on gardens have not disappeared from London with the conclusion of Chelsea Flower Show. In Lambeth, until September 21, the Garden Museum exhibits Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party, celebrating the photographer’s love of his garden. Until June 18 the Philip Mould Gallery in Pall Mall exhibits Garden to Canvas, an exhibit of yet more flower paintings by Cedric Morris, a serious gardener who travelled to study plants in the wild.
The biggest garden exhibition is Unearthed: The Power of Gardening, at the British Library until August 10, with linked exhibits travelling to 30 public libraries across the UK. What exactly is the “power”? Obviously, gardening has the power to grow food for us and to cover the ground with handsome trees and flowers. It can also exert power on how we spend our time. I much like Cecil Beaton’s remark: “my garden is the greatest joy of my life after my friends. Both are worth living for.”
The British Library takes a different angle. It pitches gardening as “transformative, enriching and sometimes radical”, with an impact on “people, communities and the environment”. I hope it brings in the crowds, but it is a hard subject to bring to life through displays of books. On weekends in June, many London gardens open under the National Gardens Scheme and attest real gardening and its power. The scheme is a transformative force and Unearthed should have mentioned it.
In several rooms it shows short videos, including a luridly coloured one by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg which presents a pollinator’s eye view of the square outside the Library. It also shows objects including the garden boots of the great Gertrude Jekyll, less dilapidated than I expected. One of Edwin Budding’s original lawnmowers is on show too, a transformative invention of the 1830s. I pined for the star exhibit of a British Library show in 2004: the poet Philip Larkin’s rotary motor mower and his letters of complaint to its maker about its failure to start or cut wet grass. An employee in the complaints section answered Larkin’s repeated letters with masterly aplomb and no idea of who he was.
The highlights of Unearthed are lesser-known texts. They include Profitable Instructions for Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchin Gardens, by Richard Gardiner, a gardener from Shrewsbury, published as early as 1603 after very poor harvests in England. He wrote this practical guide for small plots and described carrots, mainly purple or yellow ones: orange carrots, I learnt, were bred later in honour of William III of Orange. The copy on display was signed by its lady owner, evidence, if it was needed, that women already took a practical interest in what grew round their homes.
Visitors to Unearthed will not feel short-changed, but they may be puzzled by the scope and emphasis of what they see and read in captions. Despite the show’s bold title, much of it is about gardening only in London. Scotland should have been a major theme, both for the superb botanical garden in Edinburgh and also for the soil and climate that have allowed transformative gardening, especially with plants from the Himalayas and other parts of east Asia. Rhododendrons are given one little space and camellias receive none.
So far as other countries feature, it is largely through a dark veil of “empire”. Orchid collectors are presented as despoilers of sensitive local ecologies and pillagers of wild plants by the thousand. More needs to be explained. Many collectors did indeed pillage, but many were freelance profit seekers from and in countries that were not in a western empire. Offering cash, they were freely helped by locals who marvelled at their determination and helped to pack their loot, sometimes adding even more bits of wild orchids. Plants from Thailand, Vietnam or Japan were then sold to rich buyers in France, Britain and elsewhere.
There are exhibitions which live on with visitors because of what they show, whereas others live on because of what they omit: Unearthed is one. I am still pondering its gaps. One power of gardening is to promote ever more nurseries in a mutually supporting loop. Between 1600 and around 1640 there was an explosion in England in new garden plants and nurseries, especially in and near London. Anglocentric Unearthed passes over it. The remarkable Henry Wise and George London had transformative nurseries in 17th century London, including one on the site of what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. They should have featured.
Sustainability, so called “weeds” and wilding receive predictable bouquets, as does “no mow May”, though its decidedly mixed results were well set out in the FT by Sarah Langford on May 1. My acid test for shows about gardening is what they say, or not, about roses, Britain’s best beloved flower. Unearthed omits them. Their power and transformation deserved major space, as did their breeders and historians, from Graham Thomas to David Austin and Peter Beales.
The power of garden journals needed much more detail too. Surely the FT’s own Arthur Hellyer, though white and male, deserved space, a transformative editor of Amateur Gardening for decades, author of the best practical guides and a fascinating figure to unearth. The national Grow Your Own campaign during the first world war receives a little tribute: it was the movement that turned young Hellyer to gardening.
Declarations in captions about the evils of imperialism and colonialism paper over a much more complex history. Crops like rubber or tea were indeed diffused widely across the British empire, but plant collectors were not a consequence of empire nor are botanical gardens all rooted in evil colonial pasts. Gardens in prisons feature, but the recent surge in them is ignored. It has been fostered by a trophy begun by the astute Lord Windlesham in 1983 and now judged yearly by the RHS; 2024’s winner, HMP Whatton in Nottinghamshire, beat excellent competitors.
As for “radical” gardening, after the True Levellers in the late 1640s, who were not just gardeners, the show focuses on groups who have stood out against urban development. The Tolmers Square squatters in Camden in the 1970s are prime exhibits. However, I once went with Hellyer to see if the FT should cover their improvised gardening. They had made a few flowerbeds and allowed antirrhinums to seed in cracked buildings, but much as we liked their spirit they were not a subject for our FT columns. The squatters used to go weekly to Covent Garden market and bulk buy the vegetables they then sold to participants at a discount, as Nick Wates mentions in his fine 1976 book, The Battle For Tolmers Square, which gives only a brief mention to gardening.
So far from being “radical”, gardening in Britain has been blamed for the absence of a revolutionary proletariat or of a leadership deeply committed to industrial manufacture. From Attlee to Corbyn, vegetable gardening has been an iconic socialist recreation, but not an instrument of red power.
Dandelions as good garden plants, “pesticides” as universally wicked . . . Early on, we confront a film of the CoCo Collective, members of the African diaspora who garden together on a plot in Lewisham. They speak of gardening as healing and as a means of refinding roots: one amiable spokesman states he develops “goosebumps” whenever he enters his garden plot. Whenever? I do not believe him. So I asked the celebrated author and gardener Jamaica Kincaid, visiting with me, for her view. “The garden as Prozac?” she replied. Stress, anxiety and exertion need emphasis too.
“Unearthed: The Power Of Gardening”, British Library, London, until August 10; bl.uk
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