Garden Futures: Designing with Nature opens at V&A Dundee
UK-exclusive exhibition runs from 17 May 2025 to 25 January 2026
The role that gardens play in all of our lives is celebrated at V&A Dundee’s major exhibition for 2025, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, which opens on 17 May. The exhibition is a UK exclusive at V&A Dundee and runs until 25 January 2026.
The exhibition delves into how garden design impacts us all in useful and joyful ways, from providing food through kitchen gardens and the resurgent allotment movement, to inspiring beautiful designs and artworks ranging from William Morris to contemporary videogames. Garden Futures: Designing with Nature digs up surprising stories of gardens through time, including creating sanctuaries and empowering communities and individuals to find peace and hope in times of adversity.
More than 400 objects are on display in this vibrant and colour-filled exhibition, which is brought to life through light, sound, texture and a garden scent trail, including the fragrances of rose, jasmine and narcissus.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature reflects the broad style and variety of gardens across the globe – from a window box to a vast estate – celebrating and exploring every element of what a garden can be. It takes visitors on a journey from Persian garden paradises to the sustainable Oban Seaweed Gardens, from huge vertical gardens in Milan flourishing in giant concrete apartment blocks to a videogame-inspired garden in China.
Iconic garden designer Piet Oudolf’s simple but artistic garden designs give an insight into his distinctive naturalistic planting style, while the landscape at Maggie’s Dundee, created by Arabella Lennox-Boyd, demonstrates how healing through nature in a peaceful and reflective garden can be an integral part of a cancer care centre.
The exhibition also includes Dior menswear inspired by the garden at Charleston in Sussex which was a retreat in the early 20th century for the writers and creatives known as the Bloomsbury Group, where they could safely express their queerness and individuality. There are also textiles not just inspired by nature but grown from it: Zena Holloway’s Rootfull, a biomaterial made from wheatgrass roots, has been used to create a dress designed by Phoebe English.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature is an exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Nieuwe Instituut, supported by Weleda, Gardena and the Stanley Smith (UK) Horticultural Trust.
The exhibition has been further developed by V&A Dundee with the addition of new Scottish stories of garden design – including Maxwell Community Garden in Dundee, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta and the plans for Eden Project Scotland – to create a unique look at gardening and garden design, both at home and across the world.
First Minister of Scotland John Swinney MSP said: “Regardless of whether it is a large outdoor space such as a garden or allotment, or a patio, balcony or windowsill – our gardens can offer a place of sanctuary and joy. “We know that getting outdoors and connecting with nature is good for our physical health and our mental wellbeing. This wonderful exhibition at V&A Dundee explores these themes, as well as promoting innovative ideas around garden design and future sustainability. “I am sure that it will provide inspiration to anyone who is passionate, or just curious, about the world of gardening and the many benefits it can provide – for us, and our natural environment. “The Scottish Government has long been a supporter of the V&A Dundee, and we’ll be providing the museum with £3.8 million in 2025-26. I recognise V&A Dundee’s important work and positive impact it is making to the city, wider region and across Scotland.”
Leonie Bell, Director of V&A Dundee, said: “We are delighted to be opening Garden Futures: Designing with Nature at V&A Dundee as gardens and gardeners across Scotland are hitting their seasonal stride.
“Gardens are both everyday and extraordinary – they mean something different to everyone. These designed spaces reflect the times we live in and express our relationship with nature. Some are productive spaces for work, rest and play, while others represent profound spiritual, cultural and political ideas.
“This vibrant exhibition blooms with design stories of gardens from Scotland and around the world, unearthing different approaches to creating the ‘perfect’ garden. Garden Futures looks back to early earthly ideas of paradise and considers how gardening can cultivate a greener, fairer and more joyful future for humans and nature alike.
“Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or you’ve never grown anything in your life, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking experience, providing moments of sanctuary and creative inspiration within its stunning design. We look forward to welcoming visitors who we hope will come away with a renewed sense of what a garden can mean, or a new-found curiosity about gardening and growing.”
Sabrina Handler, Deputy Director at the Vitra Design Museum, said: “Gardens are places of productivity, pleasure, and regeneration. They express identities, visions, and dreams, and share a vast cultural history all over the world.
“In recent years – as we have become more aware of the risks of climate change and depleting biodiversity – they have become places of experimentation for a more sustainable future, which is reflected in concepts for urban farms or vertical gardens, as well as in the related discourses on power structures, biodiversity, and other topics that characterise a progressive perspective on gardening. “So, the garden has become an avant-garde space, which really set the scene of Garden Futures, the first major exhibition on the history of modern garden design. After its presentation at the Vitra Design Museum, the Design Museum Helsinki and the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Vandalorum in Sweden, and at the Nieuwe Instituut, we are very thrilled to see this exhibition blossoming in an extended appearance at the wonderful V&A Dundee.”
Visitors to Garden Futures: Designing with Nature can expect a sensory journey through traditional and modern gardens and landscapes, exploring how gardens can support and energise us, providing sanctuary and community when we need it.
Scottish places and spaces feature in the exhibition alongside fascinating images of gardens from across the world: the revolutionary designer Mien Ruys and her accessible, modern designs for communal urban spaces; green groves surrounded by bare earth at ‘church forests’ in Ethiopia; Bosco Verticale in Milan – a residential skyscraper covered in greenery; the writer Jamaica Kincaid’s lush garden in Vermont, USA; and the healing and transformative power of community gardens, including Birmingham’s Uplands Allotments.
History lovers will enjoy some of the earliest examples of garden design, including such treasures as an ancient tile panel from Iran which dates back to the 17th century, which is being shown to the public for the first time in a generation, and intricate patterned wallpaper by William Morris. Visitors are taken on a journey through time as they view images of people moved to action during periods of conflict and political strife, and the changes in product design that followed, including the explosion of consumerism after the Second World War.
The exhibition brings us right up to the present with digital tools and videogames designed with plants and biodiversity in mind. Visitors will be able to get hands-on with Garden by Dundee-based creative studio Biome Collective, a videogame that allows players to create a virtual musical garden, and the Pollinator Pathway digital tool that creates a planting design tailored for the maximum benefit of pollinating insects.
Sustainability is also in the spotlight, as demonstrated by origami-inspired self-watering plant pots made from marine waste, developed by Glasgow-based company POTR.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature delivers a unique ‘garden in a gallery’ experience, which brings the outside inside. Walking through the rooms of the exhibition takes visitors through a variety of nature-inspired environments, and they will find themselves surrounded by an immersive hedge maze, stepping inside a wooden greenhouse, or gazing at a woven wall of floral beauty.
The aim of the curators who have developed the exhibition for V&A Dundee, Francesca Bibby and James Wylie, is to create an evocative and inclusive collection of fascinating objects which encourages garden lovers and non-gardeners alike to connect with what a garden means to them.
The exhibition celebrates and explores every element of what a garden can be: paradise, sanctuary, retreat, labour of love, functional, beautiful, small or large, private or shared. Garden Futures: Designing with Nature runs from 17 May 2025 until 25 January 2026 at V&A Dundee.
For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.vam.ac.uk/dundee
Members and young people aged 18 and under go free.