Remodeling the Garden Museum’s interior allowed specific spaces for these displays:
Museum director Christopher Woodward, during an interview with heritage consultant Hazelle Jackson for The London Parks and Gardens Trust, described the renovations as installing “a modern museum into a medieval church for very little money and very quickly.”
A freestanding timber structure created contemporary spaces within the historic structure. Designed by Dow Jones Architects,London andprefabricated in Switzerland, three huge trucksdelivered the project panels. The renovation does not touch the old stone walls. “It’s a ground-breaking use of new building technology,” says Woodward.
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The garden tomb of the Tradescant Family, 17th century gardeners to royalty and plant hunters, led to the founding of the Museum of Garden History in 1976. John and Rosemary Nicholson traced the Tradescant tomb to the churchyard of the deconsecrated and derelict St Mary-at-Lambeth Church – London.
The Nicholsons were not gardeners but were interested in the lives of the Tradescants. They recognized the significance of the church building and its surroundings and sought support to save the property from demolition. They pointed out to officials that the church was on the route of a proposed South London walkway to celebrate H.M. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and planned the creation of a Museum of Garden History.
The Museum has over 9000 objects, all representing British gardens and gardening. Objects currently on display range from equipment made for country estates to improvised tools put together by enthusiasts in their own back gardens.
There is a space devised with low light levels within the new renovation to display works from the Museum’s collection of over 4,000 works on paper, from Edwardian postcards to 17th-century florilegia.
A gallery specifically for temporary exhibitions means the Museum can borrow from national collections. According to Woodward, patron research shows that one clear role for the Museum should be as a center for exhibitions about gardens and garden design.
The Knot Garden and the Wild Garden liven up the Museum’s walled areas while educating visitors. Innercity garden challenges, in what was once a cemetery, include thin, fast-draining soil and urban pollution. Making gardens in such a location causes a microclimate that favors plants such as the banana (Musa acuminata), olive (Olea Europaea) and oleander (Nerium oleander). Volunteer gardeners give time and energy each week to maintain the gardens.
Historically authentic plants compose the 17th century style knot garden that represents 17th century taste and style. John Tradescant the elder would have been familiar with such a garden.
The garden, designed in 1981 by then Museum President, The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, is traditional and geometric. A square low-growing hedge, planted with dwarf boxwood (Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’), encloses and incorporates a smaller square, a large circle and four half circles.
A spring and summer mixture of shrubs, roses, herbaceous perennials, annuals and bulbs embroiders compartment interiors suitable to cottage gardens. The winter atmosphere is more formal because hedge patterns are clear. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother formally opened the Knot Garden in 1983.
The historic graveyard at the front of the Museum is site of the wild garden created in Spring 2007. Plants rich in pollen and nectar to attract insects and provide a longer-flowering display form the garden’s foundation.
June 2007 brought abundant plants in flower, and combinations of flowers and grass stems against and in the middle of ancient tombs was dramatic. A surprise was copious flowering of foreign opium poppies (Papaver somniferum). Disturbing seed lying dormant beneath existing turf and bringing them into the light probably caused germination and resultant flowering.
The wild garden is manually cut back in either August or September, depending on weather. Top-growth is left in-place to allow seed to fall from stems. After two weeks, cuttings are raked and collected. The garden then remains dormant until the following spring.
*The Museum is fully accessible for wheelchairs.
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