Gardens on paper: Prints and drawings 1200–1900 and London's pride: The glorious history of the capital's gardens and the nursery garden

Abstract

Exhibitions of gardens and garden history are nigh impossible, for all Sir Roy Strong's call in The Sunday Times of London (6 May 1990) for a British museum of garden history. Images of gardens can be put on walls; garden sculpture, seats or examples of free-standing trellis work or arbours can be featured; miniature gardenist spaces can even be recreated; yet one is still emphatically not in a garden. One doubts whether even the recreation of a whole series of cultural garden identikits along the lines of what Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe has designed for the Moody Gardens, Galveston, Texas, can really accommodate gardens within a museum format. And books which record garden exhibitions remove us yet one stage further from the realities of the material they often lovingly record.