There is a new hiding place in London, across the river from Westminster: near and yet very, very far. In the middle is a pocket Eden, courtesy of designer Dan Pearson.
Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
A view across the cloistered garden, with rare specimens mingling with finer varieties of popular garden plants.
“The main idea behind the plant choices was to create a garden of treasures from all over the world,” explains Huw Morgan of Dan Pearson Studio, “some of them familiar as garden plants, others unusual, strange and intriguing. It’s a cabinet of horticultural curiosities.”
Architectural plants such as Tetrapanax to the left and Canna rise above dozens of Epimedium wushanense ‘Caramel’, that do not look like epimedium at all, and evergreen Ophiopogon caulescens, collected by Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones in Java, Indonesia.
Plants and tombs as garden theatre, viewed from four sides.
The cloister garden, or Sackler Garden as it is more properly called, is surrounded by glass on all sides like a giant “Wardian case” a glass box devised in the 19th century for transporting and raising unknown plants from the New World.
Flowers of Nandina domestica (later developing into red berries) next to Tradescant’s tomb.
A moth takes to the unusual fig Ficus ‘Silver Lyre’. Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris (“Park-in-Sun’s Terrestrial Paradise”) imagined a contemporary Eden based on the supposed original: all the plants of the world, collected in one place.
Tradescant’s tomb, intricately carved with a crocodile, shells, and trees.
In the foreground is handsome, bronze-leafed Actaea simplex ‘James Compton’, introduced by the eponymous latter-day botanist.
“A walled garden could be an Eden,” continues Christopher.
Coppery Astelia nervosa, fern-like Adiatum venustum and Fragaria vesca (wild strawberries) spilling over a gravestone.
A tombstone paver at the Garden Museum, London. The gravestones on site were not allowed to be moved, yet the effect is the opposite of gloomy.
The Garden Museum is open daily except for holidays; see hours and information at Garden Museum.