Articles

To see the world's flora in London, Kate Smith reckons Kew is the place to head for – with greenhouses adjusted to every climate and vast acres of hardier plants representing the remotest places on earth. But, staffed by passionate botanists, the emphasis is generally on plant types rather than garden design. Gardens are a meeting of plants with style and form - and you often need to go elsewhere in London to complete the picture and begin to imagine the ideal gardens of the world.

London has a history of borrowings and exotica stretching back as far as the Romans. Some of these, like the London plane, have become utterly identified with the city. Others - like grape vines - have been repeatedly re-introduced, clinging onto the edges of viability in a cold climate.

Plant ownership

The eighteenth century was the pivotal moment for British gardeners. As future colonialists began their first forays to America , Australasia and elsewhere, their hunger for territory was matched by a more benign obsession with botany. Calmias, rhododendrons and azaleas were all first brought back from America by collectors who gathered seeds throughout the autumn to feed the wealthy English gardeners and later a big market of green-fingered Londoners.

The politics of modern plant-hunting closely follows the evolution of attitudes to museum collecting. In recent years a US drug company’s attempt to patent turmeric was first allowed, and then thankfully seen off by Indian scientists. Now countries draw a careful line between plant sharing and biopiracy. Kew has become a sort of zoo for world plants that may be threatened in their current habitat, but they are careful to participate in conventions that ensure the benefits of plants are shared with their country of origin.

The urge to build gardens in a city is always countered by the urge to make very large sums of money from real estate. Many of London’s most luminous gardens have been eaten up by time and concrete. Still new, albeit mostly smaller, gardens have risen in their place. Cultural institutions have brought complete world gardens to London - often as symbols of what is best in a culture. Museums are also experimenting with gardens as extended exhibitions - with the frailer components often packed away at the end of a long summer.p>

Ten kinds of London garden

1. The vanished gardens of Central London

There’s nothing left of the gardens built by the Romans in central London, although some of their farming and gardening tools can be seen in the Museum of London. (Look out for an iron handsaw dug up at the site of the Bank of England, used for trimming long-ago fruit trees, shrubs, and for cutting plants). The Romans brought box, lime, sycamore and sweet chestnut to London and probably mulberry, quince, peach, plum, medlar and fig. After the Romans left London only the stronger trees would have survived untended. Future travelers re-introduced the species centuries later.

For 300 years a famous garden flourished at Holborn. Vine Street commemorates the site of a vineyard, and there were also grapes grown at Smithfield . The Norman Conquest seems to have brought wine and vine specialists in its wake, bringing improvements to the vineyards and new kinds of grapes.

2. Dutch ideas

Though Hampton Court Palace is seen as a monument to Tudor style, its gardens are a reflection of the Dutch ideas that William of Orange brought in 1688. He added more and smaller fountains, and astonishingly moved about some of the 30 year old lime trees to suit his taste. The most lasting and famous innovation though was the Hampton Court maze– mazes being common in many Dutch gardens.

3. Chinese gardens

In the 18th century Sir William Chambers constructed a number of Chinese buildings at Kew . The only survivor is the Chinese pagoda - rather too heavily set for a proper Chinese building and now stripped by time of its colour and dragons. The building was once flanked by a ‘mosque’ (which was taken down before it fell down in 1772) and an ‘ alhambra ’. Viewed at the time as a bit of a tacky theme park, these innovations were still one of the earlier attempts to create the look of extremely remote places in an English setting.

The British Museum hosted a Chinese garden in the summer of 2006 – with most plants coming from Sichuan province in South West China. The plants were chosen for their utility and cultural significance – including gingko bilboa, bamboo, the lacquer tree and the handkerchief tree.  The garden was staged to complement the stunning depictions of flora and fauna on ceramics on show the British Museum, so to experience a taste of Chinese outdoors indoors, head to gallery 95.

4. Japanese gardens

There are several Japanese gardens in London and the South East, in various states of repair. The garden on the roof of the Brunei Gallery centred around rocks only sparsely planted, but offers an unexpected meditative space in the middle of the city. You can get access to it whenever the gallery is open.

A tiny Japanese garden sits in the back of the Fan Museum in Greenwich – completely hidden by other houses it can only be seen by people visiting the museum. Kew Gardens contains a complete minka, or Japanese farmhouse next to a bamboo garden. Minka are disappearing in Japan , and being replaced by more ecologically damaging and less resilient housing. The minka preservation society are dedicated to retaining some of these warm, compostable, flood- and earthquake-proof homes. They donated Kew ’s minka in 2001.

Our favourite though is the Kyoto Gardens in Holland Park, a beautiful mixture of water features and carefully tended plants.

5. Islamic Gardens

London is not without Islamic gardens, but as we write, the gates of Paradise are firmly shut. A transitory oasis existed at London Olympia in mid July as part of the Islam expo exhibition. Islamic garden designer Emma Clark tried to include many of the facets that are typical: geometric form, trees, brightly coloured scented plants and water features. As Clark comments, Islamic gardens come from countries where water and shade are valued – it’s an act of translation to make them work in a climate where both of these are common, and not all the plants they would typically contain can survive. But the beauty of the form can still be applied and Clark has created two permanent gardens in London, both in private hands.

The Ismaili Centre has a garden on its roof complete with trees and water features. Photographs are forbidden, but it is occasionally open during June Open Garden weekends during the summer.

The other gardens in London with some claim to Islamic form are The Roof Gardens based on the Alhambra in Spain, and sitting 100 feet above Kensington High Street. Created in the 1930s, and part of a one and a half acre aerial complex, they are now owned by Richard Branson. If you want to get in, though, you apparently need to be organising a very posh wedding.

6. Buddhist gardens

The Tibet Foundation maintains the Tibetan Peace Garden which is next to the Imperial War Museum. It was opened by the Dalai Lama in 1999. Since then the Foundation has had the garden blessed by Tibetan spiritual masters whenever they get the opportunity. At the centre of the garden is a mandala - an elaborately decorated circle representing wholeness. These often appear in Buddhist art and are sometimes constructed from different coloured sands. The garden mandala, slightly more permanent, is bronze.

The remarkable Buddhapadipa Temple in Wimbledon is surrounded by four acres of gardens with winding paths through trees and over ponds.

7. African gardens

In 2005 the British Museum planted an African garden on its forecourt for the summer. The garden has now been transplanted to the Horniman Museum in South London . Obviously a seasonal garden, much of it is stored for the winter and then replanted in the summer months.

8. A Latin American glasshouse

One of London’s newest gardens is under glass at Brockwell Park.

Hundreds of seeds have been collected from right across Latin America in the last few years. Corn, twenty kinds of tomato, chilli and all sorts of flowers fill the space, which is being used for children's art events and poetry classes. The project is being driven by the Latin American community in London but all are welcome.

9. Surviving trees

Some of the original international trees imported by 18th century enthusiasts still survive in London, especially at Kew . The 1775 Cycad in the palm house is comparatively young; its genus lives for up to 2,500 years. Still, like the 1760 Japonica outside in the park it's been more interested in growing horizontally than vertically for some centuries - both are supported by arboreal zimmer frames. Kew Gardens offers a trail of some of its oldest and most interesting trees – just ask for a leaflet at the Box Office.

Syon Park in West London contains some mulberry bushes imported from Persia in 1548. In the early fifties Gladys Taylor wrote ‘we are accustomed to see mulberry trees, but here are dome-shaped bushes, higher than a man and of great circumference.’ It’s privately owned by a Duke, but open to visitors from March to October. (Mulberry trees seem to inspire a rather obsessive passion – this website attempts to list every specimen in the country.)

10. Secret gardens

The Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture helps some of London's most vulnerable refugees. Often living in marginal accommodation and dealing with the asylum process, they work on gardens belonging to MF at Finsbury Park as well as allotments in outer London . The gardens are for obvious reasons never open to the public. These most recent arrivals in London are quite often former farmers. They don’t yet know the language, how to negotiate this city, or cope with the past. So they dig.

Further reading

Old London Gardens by Gladys Taylor (out of print)

The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf

The Art of the Islamic Garden by Emma Clark