Force of nature | How art is blossoming in botanic gardens

In 2021, St Andrews Botanic Garden in Fife announced it was removing its glasshouses as part of a radical reimagining of what it offers visitors and the local community.

As part of the project to better reflect local biodiversity, St Andrews worked with local artist Dan Drage to devise interventions using dead wood, a plentiful, cost-effective resource thanks to recent storms that have battered Scotland’s east coast.

Installing contemporary pieces in green spaces is just one example of how art is playing an increasing role in the evolution of Britain’s botanic institutions as they look to attract new audiences. They were often set up to support university research and teaching, but they now aim to cultivate interest in plants more widely.

Programmers at several gardens see working with artists as a vital tool for increasing audience diversity as well as fulfilling objectives in areas such as education and decolonisation.

For Paul Denton, the head of visitor programmes and exhibitions at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, art is particularly useful for communicating stories from its horticulture and science departments.

“Part of my remit includes enthusing people about the importance of plants and fungi, and extending our reach, making us feel as welcoming and accessible as possible,” he says.

“Much of that is achieved through storytelling, and we all know artists are the best storytellers. They can take complex issues, like how plants benefit us and do amazing work in these areas; it’s already embedded in their practice.”

Calum McAndrew, the education and engagement manager at St Andrews, is responsible for its creative programme.

“A big part of what the public perceives as the role of botanic gardens is as pretty spaces,” says McAndrew, who adds that art installations can enhance large areas when plants die and space needs to be filled.

Working in partnership

McAndrew, a science communicator, relies on project funding alongside ad hoc agreements with artists such as Drage, who already had an association with St Andrews University.

Relationships with cultural bodies are also important, notably local Fife Contemporary. Through this council-funded arts organisation, McAndrew recently recruited an artist-in-residence, Emma Varley, raising around £12,000 for her services.

Varley’s AI-generated film Unseen Worlds – Fertile Ground was the first work shown in St Andrews’ new exhibition space, the Bioscope, a custom-built, organic timber structure designed by specialists from Bartlett School of Architecture, London. The space opened in 2023.

“The idea is to trial new materials that are grown rather than built – these are live panels that sequester carbon,” says McAndrew. “We’re reassessing how we do this, so we have more attractive panels – living art we call it.”

St Andrews' Bioscope will reopen later this year, once its innovative panels have been refitted. In the meantime, the garden is looking to raise funds to appoint a curatorial role, bringing extra skills to ease pressure on a compact management team that relies on casual staff for delivery.

“Something we’ve realised while doing these things is we need someone who can expand our educational programme to provide an extra hook to get people into the gardens,” McAndrew says.

“We need someone who can effectively work with artists, because being the go-between can be time-consuming, as is evaluation. We want to improve engagement, create targets for growing our audiences, especially those with less education. That would allow us to access further pots of money.”

An artful strategy

Appointing artists-in-residence to create work through dedicated research and collaboration with scientists seems an increasingly popular move, as shown at Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

Here, Nabil Ali is working on a 14-month project funded by Arts Council England. Dye – Nature, Myth and Climate sees the creation of a database of colourants inspired by medieval recipes, alongside workshops and performances.

Ali has worked with plants for many years and sees the Cambridge garden as a natural home for his latest endeavour.

“The garden grew a range of manuscript plants I wanted to experiment with,” he says.

“I have been a visiting tutor in Cambridge since 2016 and delivered adult workshops at Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Fitzwilliam Museum’s Open Cambridge event with great success, sharing my knowledge on making natural paint and inks, so the residency was a natural progression.”

Kew, meanwhile, has the resources to develop higher profile projects, including with leading names from the art world.

Its winter exhibition, Petrichor – the name given to the smell of rain – featured work by Mat Collishaw and closed in April to be replaced in May by a show dedicated to Marc Quinn, an artist who has long been interested in flowers.

For the exhibition Light into Life (4 May to 29 September), Quinn has worked with staff at the London attraction in a two-way process.

“Artists can speak to our scientists and horticulturalists, look at our collections and that can inform their work – it’s mutually beneficial,” says Denton from Kew.

“Within his practice, Marc was already invested in plants and flora, which have appeared in a lot of his work. It doesn’t feel like we’re shoehorning in an artist.”

Quinn has collaborated with specialists in fields such as taxonomy and plant diversity to create pieces inspired by significant plants from Kew’s collection, such as the Pacific yew.

Fertile ground

Exhibitions such as those developed by Quinn and Collishaw have made use of Kew’s Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art.

The building, which opened in 2008, displays works by contemporary botanical artists that Sherwood has collected over 30 years, alongside works from Kew’s historical archive of more than 200,000 botanical paintings.

The gallery has evolved over the years, welcoming a diverse range of practitioners in exhibitions that display new work and interact with Kew’s collection. Lots of hard work has gone into raising the profile of the gallery to make it a destination in itself.

“When I started four-and-a-half years ago you could have blinked and missed it,” Denton says. “I was given a specific remit to make this resource of real importance.”

Working with contemporary artists also helps botanic gardens tackle issues such as decolonisation.

Most gardens have been implicated in the growth and impact of the former British empire, both in their range of living plants and herbariums, collections of preserved plants that relied on global networks of explorers, traders and growers.

Next year, Kew presents Flora Indica, an exhibition named after a historic guide to Indian plants, where a contemporary artist will respond to Kew’s Indian botanical art collection.

Denton points out that Kew has started to adapt its interpretation, opening up its collections and explaining where exhibits come from.

“Artists can play an important role in that,” he says. “Flora Indica will cover themes around India, the former empire and the movement of plants.”

Decolonisation is also an important theme in the artistic programme at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. Emma Nicolson was recruited five years ago to re-imagine its arts programme and devise a new vision for curating Inverleith House, which sits in the gardens.

Last year, her job title changed from head of creative programmes to head of arts.

“The aim was to think about art more strategically across the organisation,” she explains. “I’ve been working on more collaborative projects with colleagues in science and research.”

Nicolson has developed a strand around the emerging field of plant humanities, research into the social impact of plants in areas such as economics and medicine.

Edinburgh has also recently secured an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded fellowship into intangible heritage, placing an artist/curator in its archives looking at fungal scents.

She has also used a £150,000 grant secured in 2020 from the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, to devise Climate House as a way to rethink exhibitions.

This includes sustainable practices as well as addressing topics such as biodiversity loss, climate justice and colonial legacies. Artists who have collaborated so far include Turner Prize-shortlisted collective Cooking Sections and cross-disciplinary artist Christine Borland.

For Nicolson, it was also important such figures met garden specialists on an informal basis.

 “They’ve had research visits, but I also started a new approach of introducing artists to horticulturalists and scientists. This included informal lunches where artists presented their work, which meant a range of people from across the garden could find where synergies lay. I think everyone gets something out of it.”

Chris Mugan is a freelance journalist

Back to nature

Australian artist Keg de Souza’s 2023 exhibition Shipping Roots at Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh explored the colonial legacy of its plant collection.

Like many projects at the gardens, it came about through a longstanding professional relationship with its head of arts Emma Nicolson, who first worked with De Souza at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

“Keg had an interesting social practice that was unlike anything that was going on in Australia at the time,” Nicolson says.

“We have an ongoing connection with a number of these artists. Knowing her practice, I was sure she could relate to climate emergency, climate justice and, as a young woman of colour, she would bring a different lens that the gardens hadn’t experienced before.”

With funding in place, including from arts funding body Creative Australia, De Souza came to Scotland for four months in 2022 to spend time in the archives, dig into the history and make work.

For Shipping Roots, the artist focused on plants embedded in the history of the former British empire, notably her native eucalyptus, which has caused environmental damage in India, and the prickly pear, which the British introduced to the antipodes.

De Souza’s transformation of the gallery spaces at Inverleith House, using plants and recordings, had a huge impact on visitors.

“The positive feedback from visitors was remarkable – we were amazed at how it captured people’s imaginations,” Nicolson says.

“We had a lot of Australian visitors, including some Aboriginal elders visiting the National Museum of Scotland, and hearing their responses was really moving.”