Unearthed: The Power of Gardening opens at the British Library
- Unearthed: The Power of Gardening (2 May – 10 August 2025) explores the transformative, enriching and sometimes radical power of gardening in Britain
- Presents historic manuscripts, artefacts and artworks alongside contemporary material, including a new piece by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and a series of short films featuring grass-roots gardening organisation Coco Collective
- Series of events starring Jamaica Kincaid, Olivia Laing, Beth Orton, Adam Frost, Poppy Okotcha, Zakia Sewell and Matthew Herbert at the British Library
- Exhibition accompanied by displays at 30 public libraries across the UK and a new book featuring 10 original garden designs by award-winning designers and landscape architects including Harry Holding, Tonkin Liu, Grow to Know and Sarah Eberle
Unearthed: The Power of Gardening (2 May – 10 August 2025) is a major new exhibition exploring the transformative, enriching and sometimes radical power of gardening in Britain and the impact it has on people, communities and the environment.
From botanical gardens and allotments to windowsills and green community spaces, Unearthed reveals how the act of gardening can promote healing and wellbeing, forge closer communities, refresh neglected spaces and drive social change. The exhibition delves into the evolution of gardening practices, the movement of plants through the British Empire and looks ahead to how gardening might alleviate the impact of climate change on the natural world.
Unearthed also considers the role gardening has played in social and political movements, from the Diggers and True Levellers protesting the Enclosure Acts during the English Civil War, to the Garden City movement of the early 20th century, and up to the present day where guerilla gardeners use seed bombs to plant flowers in neglected urban spaces.
Highlighting the Library’s rich horticultural and botanical collections, exhibits will include:
- The only surviving illustrated collection of herbal remedies from Anglo-Saxon England (around 1000–25)
- Handwritten plans and records by renowned gardeners, including Beth Chatto’s notes for transforming a car park in Essex into a gravel garden (1991) on loan from the Archive of Garden Design, Garden Museum and John Evelyn’s sketch showing the tools he thought a gardener should have (about 1660-80)
- The first English gardening manual, A Most Briefe and Pleasaunte Treatise by Thomas Hill (1563)
- One of the finest botanical works ever produced, The Hortus Eystettensis (1613), which revolutionised the representation of plants
- A portrait of John Ystumllyn, one of Britain’s earliest known Black gardeners, painted in 1754 and on loan from a private collection, care of Anthony Mould Ltd.
- One of two surviving 19th-century Victorian Wardian cases in the UK, which were invented to keep plants alive on long sea voyages by creating a protective environment of constant humidity, on loan from the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- The first mechanical lawnmower (1832), reportedly tested by its inventor Edwin Budding at night to avoid ridicule from his neighbours, on loan from Ransomes Jacobsen Ltd.
- Gardening boots belonging to horticulturalist and designer Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) loaned by Guildford Heritage Service, Guildford Borough Council
- Striking examples of botanical art from across the world, including paintings of honeysuckle (about 1806) and waterlilies (about 1798–1805) from India and drawings of flowers, plants and fruits native to China (about 1701)
- The Prisoner's Herbal (2019) by activist Nicole Rose who was imprisoned during the 2010s, in which Rose identifies weeds commonly found in prison yards, such as dandelions and nettles, and explores how they can be used as herbal remedies and in cooking
Unearthed showcases a series of new short films produced in collaboration with Coco Collective, a grass-roots gardening organisation with two Afro-diaspora led community gardens in London. The films explore the links between food growing and wellbeing practices, consider gardens as a way to reclaim space and build community, and examine the legacies of empire on plant cultivation and the importance of embracing ancestral knowledge.
The exhibition culminates within a specially commissioned video installation by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Expanding on her award-winning interspecies artwork Pollinator Pathmaker, which transforms how we see gardens and who they are designed for, Ginsberg depicts the British Library’s piazza on Euston Road from the perspective of foraging insects. Visitors will encounter a simulated landscape of Ginsberg’s digital plant paintings that switch between human view and the artist’s ‘pollinator vision’ filter. Drawing upon the utopian world Ginsberg has created within the Pollinator Pathmaker software, the work challenges us to change our perception.
Sustainability is at the core of Unearthed with the design and build having been guided by practices aimed at reducing environmental impact, with the Library measuring the carbon emissions of an exhibition for the first time. Most of the materials used in the build are bio-based and the exhibition was designed to easily disassemble for more efficient re-use and recycling.
Maddy Smith, lead curator of Unearthed: The Power of Gardening at the British Library, said: ‘Gardening is much more than simply ‘the nation’s favourite pastime’; it has the power to change people’s lives in many different ways. Gardening connects us to our past, grounds us in the present and encourages us to look ahead to the future. It is often the expansive gardens of stately homes that spring to mind when we think of historic gardens, but people from all walks of life are, and have been, gardeners. I hope the stories and voices in this exhibition, drawn from the Library’s rich horticultural collections, will take root in the minds of visitors and inspire them, whether they are gardeners or not.’
Accompanying publication and free display
A new book, Gardens of the Future: Unique Visions for a Changing World, edited by Ruth Chivers with a foreword by Olivia Laing, features 10 original garden designs by acclaimed designers and landscape architects Harry Holding, Eelco Hooftman of GROSS. MAX., Tom Massey, Ann-Marie Powell, Tonkin Liu, Nelson Byrd Woltz, Andy Sturgeon, Sophia Kaplan and Lauren Camilleri of Leaf Supply, Sarah Eberle and Grow to Know. The newly imagined designs are also on display in the Library’s free Entrance Hall Gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
Events programme
There will be a programme of events featuring writers Jamaica Kincaid and Olivia Laing in conversation (2 May), a two day takeover of the British Library Piazza for The Great Garden Fete (6-7 June) with stalls, live music and a talks programme from the Royal Horticultural Society, The Night Garden Party (6 June) with a special acoustic performance by Beth Orton, plus DJs Zakia Sewell and Matthew Herbert; the Gardens and Empires conference (27-28 June) and an evening with Adam Frost and Poppy Okotcha (10 July), with more to be revealed.
Free displays at public libraries across the UK
Inspired by the exhibition, there will be panel displays and events at 30 libraries across the UK, arranged through the Living Knowledge Network, showcasing their own collections, local green spaces and sustainability initiatives.
The exhibition is supported by a donation made in memory of Melvin R Seiden, with thanks to Stanley Smith (UK) Horticultural Trust for additional support.
Notes to editors
For media enquiries, images and interview requests, please contact alice.carter@bl.uk
Tickets cost £15 with a range of concessions available and discounts for groups of over 10 people. Camden residents are eligible for £1 tickets with proof of address.
The exhibition is open 09.30 – 18.00 on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 09.30 – 20.00 on Tuesday, 09.30 – 17.00 on Saturday and 11.00 – 17.00 on Sunday.
About the British Library
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About Pollinator Pathmaker
Pollinator Pathmaker is an artwork for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans. Created by the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose ambition is to create the world’s largest climate positive artwork, the work is a one-of-a-kind experiment in interspecies design.
As numbers of pollinating insects around the world crash, Ginsberg worked with horticulturalists, pollinator experts, and a computer scientist to devise an algorithmic tool that designs planting for pollinators’ tastes, not human taste. The result is a growing series of algorithmically-generated living artworks, designed to maximise empathy towards pollinating insects. Every artwork generated is different, but each is computed to support the greatest diversity of pollinator species. By creating for other species, art becomes a platform for empathy and agency to care for them.
The first two Pollinator Pathmaker Editions opened in 2022; a 55m permanent installation at the Eden Project, Cornwall, and eleven meandering beds over 250m in Kensington Gardens, London, commissioned by the Serpentine. The third Edition, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, opened in June 2023 in the forecourt of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
Pollinator Pathmaker is not just about large public artworks: you can also use the algorithmic tool for free to make your own living artwork at home. Simply follow the steps in the pollinator.art to select your garden conditions and play with how the algorithm solves the problem of empathy. It then generates a planting scheme for you; each design created is a one-off edition of the artwork complete with edition number. Schools and community spaces can get involved too by filling in a short application form.
About Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. She experiments with simulation, representation, and the nonhuman perspective to question our ongoing societal fixation on innovation over preservation despite the environmental crisis.
Daisy spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.
In June 2023, Daisy won the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize – Artistic Exploration for her experimental interspecies living artwork Pollinator Pathmaker with commissioned Editions currently on view at LAS Art Foundation at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Serpentine, London and at the Eden Project, Cornwall. The Jury said: 'As Pollinator Pathmaker continues to blossom, it serves as a vivid illustration of the crucial role of innovative exploration at the intersection of art, ecology, and technology can play in tackling key ecological challenges'.
Daisy won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012, the Dezeen Changemaker Award 2019. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction described as “romantic, dangerous… and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world”.
Daisy exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy. Her work is held in private and museum permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Therme Art, and ZKM Karlsruhe.
Resident at Somerset House Studios, London, Daisy was recently commissioned by Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial, to create her first stained glass window installed at The Three Chimneys in Barcelona for Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. And in October 2024, she opened her first Swedish solo exhibition at Bildmuseet, Umeå, expanding her immersive light and sound installation Machine Auguries (2019-ongoing) with three editions; London, Toledo and Umeå.