Past Exhibition: Visions of Paradise: The Japanese garden in the UK

The exhibition, through images and text, told the story of Japanese gardens and how the British have used what they have seen in Japan as inspiration to build Japanese-style gardens here. Covering the history and development of such gardens in the UK, the exhibition covered the following topics, with many high quality images and explanatory text:

• The gardens of Japan – setting the context and describing styles and aspects of design that distinguish them from western gardens. This included a history time-line and a map of Japan showing locations of twelve important gardens.
• The Japanese garden in the UK – from early interest in the late 19th century, through the important Japan-British exhibition of 1910, to the renewal of interest over the last 20 years.
• Cultural Borrowing – how ideas have been interpreted and ‘borrowed’ for the different conditions and cultural setting in the UK, including how we can evaluate the gardens we have here today.
• Gardens open to the public today – A selected list of gardens identified on a map of the UK with information and images of the more important ones.

London Guerrilla Gardening by Richard Reynolds

Richard Reynolds has been guerrilla gardening the tree pits, roadside verges, traffic islands and abandoned flower beds of south London for eight years. He and fellow troops bring life to the streets, adopting orphaned plots of land and tending them as if they were their own. As he gardens he photographs and he blogs at GuerrillaGardening.org.

The exhibition was drawn from his archive of thousands of images, showcasing highlights of London guerrilla gardening, the results of International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day and detailed the development of The London Guerrilla Lavender Field, which happens to be just a few minutes walk away from The Garden Museum and thrives to this day despite no formal agreement for it’s care from guerrilla gardeners.