The Guardian view on gallery and museum gardens: a blooming triumph | Editorial

Never mind a gnome, no other garden at this year’s Chelsea flower show can boast a Barbara Hepworth sculpture like the RHS gold-award-winning Tate Britain garden. And few will have such a significant afterlife. Designed by the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, it is a microcosm of a major redesign for the gallery’s Millbank garden, opening next spring.

Visitors to Tate Britain may be forgiven for not noticing that the 1897 gallery has a garden at all. The imposing steps and portico overshadow two rectangles of lawn. But this unloved patch will be transformed into a horticultural haven. The gallery, which like many has struggled to recover visitor numbers since the pandemic, could do with a boost.

As the recent, highly successful Turner and Constable exhibition showed, there is no shortage of natural splendours inside its walls. The new garden design was partly inspired by Victor Pasmore’s painting The Green Earth (1979-80). However, the planting is more exotic than you might expect for the home of British art, including magnolias, sago palms, a chinaberry tree, a pineapple guava, a pomegranate and a fig tree. This arboreal abundance is an unnerving recognition of London’s increasingly Mediterranean climate and a hopeful commitment to biodiversity.

Fig and pomegranate trees can also be found in the South Kensington gardens of the Natural History Museum, which reopened in 2024 after a £25m five-year revamp. With over 5 million visitors in its first year, it showed what rejuvenating London’s green spaces can do. Its once underused lawns are now an exciting extension of the museum, where schoolchildren can discover wildlife from tadpoles to dinosaur skeletons.

Art is occupying outdoor spaces elsewhere in the capital this summer. Colombian artist Delcy Morelos has filled the concrete Sculpture Court of the Barbican with 30 tonnes of soil to create her mammoth ovular mud installation Origo. And the world’s largest outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore’s sculptures opened this month at Kew Gardens.

Venues including Compton Verney in Warwickshire, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Hepworth Wakefield (with new gardens designed by Stuart-Smith in 2023) successfully bring art, architecture and nature together. “I prefer my work to be shown outside,” Hepworth said. “I think sculpture grows in the open light and with the movement of the sun its aspect is always changing.”

Sculpture has been part of garden design since antiquity. And artists have long been inspired by their own plots. As Monet said of Giverny: “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” But these new projects speak to our times, dealing with the climate emergency, biodiversity loss and a need for human connection with nature. Of course, expensive makeovers like the Clore Garden at Tate Britain or at the Natural History Museum would not be possible without hefty charitable donations. But access to both is free to all. This is vital in a city where one’s own garden is an unaffordable luxury for many.

At a time when the crumbling infrastructure of the UK’s cultural institutions urgently needs addressing, it is important to remember that they aren’t just bricks and mortar. Galleries and museums can be intimidating places. Soulless urban spaces can be transformed into welcoming attractions in their own right, encouraging more visitors through the doors. Gardens, like galleries, offer beauty and tranquillity in a troubled world. This grafting of art and horticulture should be encouraged to flourish.

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