Part of Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Gallery is in many ways the perfect venue for a show about gardens in art – it’s hard to tell where the floral shower bags in the gift shop end and the exhibition proper starts. Luckily, Buck House’s residents have a few knockout pictures and knick-knacks kicking around to suit the theme.
Spanning 400 years of horticulturally inspired art, furniture and homeware from the Royal Collection, the show has everything from fifteenth-century painted Persian manuscripts to impossibly charming diamond-encrusted gold-and-enamel Fabergé cornflowers. There’s a lot of what you’d expect: medieval scenes set in paradise gardens; courtiers chasing ladies through bushy Renaissance mazes; aerial-view paintings of sweeping estates; Sèvres ceramics; a jolly tureen shaped like a cauliflower (the brassica à la mode of 2015, no less. Ciao kale!).
But there are some strange and wonderful finds here too, like the psychedelic botanical drawings of seventeenth-century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder’s fabulously weird ‘Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’ (1615, pictured), populated by wild animals he’d certainly never encountered in life. An eighteenth-century vase on a golden mount, filled with a bouquet of soft porcelain removable flowers, with a sunflower at the centre that doubles as a clock face, really needs to be seen to be believed.
Extensive notes offer a compelling narrative about gardens and earthly power, and a reminder that these pretty plots aren’t just all fountains and follies – they’re about who owns the land, and who has dominion over its use. On this entertaining and informative stroll through garden history, perhaps the highlight is discovering that the lawnmower was invented in 1830 by a man called Edward Budding. Apparently he was a bit of a rake.
Ananda Pellerin