Garden Futures: Not for those who love a manicured lawn

Telegraph

14-05-2025

There's not much greenery in evidence when I arrive outside V&A Dundee: grey skies, a leaden sheen to the River Tay, concrete panels cladding Kengo Kuma's waterfront building, which opened in 2018. Inside, an installation by Dutch design studio DRIFT extends the monochrome theme: 11 mechanised lights, with white shades inspired by flowers that close at night, rise and fall like robotic jellyfish pulsating in an imaginary ocean.
But, with quotes on the walls by the likes of the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault, Garden Futures, the museum's new show of more than 400 objects (an expanded, 'localised' version of a touring exhibition initiated by Germany's Vitra Design Museum), is seemingly pitched at highbrow design enthusiasts as much as horticulturalists hoping to finesse their herbaceous borders. The title of the final section – 'Garden of Ideas' – distils the approach.
As someone who – to the despair of my wife – has never fired up a lawnmower, this comes as a relief. There's surely only so much excitement anyone can muster for all the scythes, rakes, watering cans and hoes in an introductory display of wall-mounted tools; many of the subsequent objects and ideas, though, proved beguiling enough to captivate this horticultural novice. That said, their presentation may irk traditionalists who relish immaculate lawns – described, in the catalogue, as monotonous 'green deserts', and associated, in the exhibition, with aggressive chemicals marketed during the 20th century to foster their growth.
Filled with artworks, including paintings by those 20th-century artists-cum-gardeners Cedric Morris and Duncan Grant, and Requiem (1957), a tall, hollowed-out walnut sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, as gorgeous and sleek as an embrace, the opening section, 'Paradise', makes plain that gardens have always been central to humanity's imagination. (Consider the Garden of Eden.) At the same time, it suggests that exclusion is intrinsic to their underlying concept: the word 'paradise', we're told, derives from the ancient Persian for 'walled enclosure'.
'Garden Politics' explicitly links the history of gardening to '19th-century European colonialism and industrialisation'. (What exhibition doesn't attempt to draw such connections these days?) There's talk, too, of 'guerrilla gardening as a political tool' and 'seed bombs'.
Yet, an inventive setting, evoking a hedge maze, suggests the complexity of the issues involved; and it's here that the exhibition's most powerful and moving artworks may be found: a pair of images by Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut of gardens scraped together in refugee camps in Tunisia and Lebanon, with plastic bottles for picket fences. One of the show's heroes, the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, magicked an unlikely garden out of stony coastal ground in Kent, having been diagnosed as HIV-positive. These examples remind us that gardens can be sanctuaries of hope.
Hope is the theme of the exhibition's final stages, which showcase enterprising work by designers inspired by gardens and nature, intended to bring about a more sustainable future. A chair consisting of a single ash sapling grown for several years around a custom frame in a Derbyshire orchard (a process its makers describe as 'biofacture', not manufacture) is drooping, skew-whiff – and beautiful. A minuscule but ingenious 'system' for aerial seeding – inspired by the seed of a flower that drills itself into the earth to germinate – may provide a remedy for desertification.
I could take or leave (okay, leave) the show's politicking. But exhibits like these represent brilliant, original concepts that bloom in the mind.