Since 2005, a Chinese man called Zheng Guogu has been creating a garden inspired by the strategy game Age of Empires. The project is ongoing, so the garden is expanding. It currently covers 20,000 square metres but it may yet become larger, spreading over more of Yangjiang, where Guogu lives. It’s not clear how he came by all this space. Nor is it immediately obvious how a garden can be inspired by a game in which you go to war with others. Perhaps he’s particularly fond of invasive species.
This is all quite intriguing and unusual, and most visitors to Garden Futures: Designing with Nature will have questions. Who is this guy? How does he handle his borders? Is his preference for perennials or annuals? Does he watch Gardener’s World? Where does empire-building come in? These won’t be answered, unfortunately. That’s partly because a display that consists of a large reproduction of a sepia photograph and a minuscule screen showing footage of Age of Empires being played is no match for a large garden.
But the more obvious, curatorially thorny reason is that gardens of the Age of Empires sort – in fact even garden-variety gardens – aren’t well suited to exhibitions. The qualities that make them enjoyable and distinct – smell, colour and texture, as well as size, pattern and progression – are hard to capture and get across in sunless gallery spaces. Work has been done to overcome this difficulty: the first of the four sections has been designed to resemble the sort of pavilion found in a Persianate garden; little boxes containing scents of rose, jasmine and narcissus are distributed throughout the show; and the exhibits encompass all that can be construed as relating in some way to the words in the title.
One might commend these efforts. They have, after all, been jointly made with the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation and the Nieuwe Instituut, all of which previously hosted Garden Futures. But they have not produced a good exhibition. The problem is that it is about everything, sort of, and therefore nothing, really: gardens, design, nature, plus a little bit about the history and future of each.
So it is that one encounters – in what feels like no particular order – Kim Jones’ Spring/Summer outfits for Dior, which are ‘inspired by the story of Charleston’; a mid-17th-century Persian tile panel; photographs of the Maggie’s Centre in Dundee; a pair of trainers that ‘imagine how city dwellers can help rewild urban environments’; a Hepworth sculpture; a Wardian case; a wholesome-looking community space underneath power lines in Kuala Lumpur; a seaweed garden in Oban; and Piet Oudolf’s pens (Sharpies, Faber-Castells and Winsor & Newtons, in case you’re curious), which admittedly have the edge on the ‘tools and materials similar to those used by Roberto Burle Marx’ displayed nearby.
There are more than 400 things on display, so the experience is a disorientating one – akin, perhaps, to the effects of inhaling the fumes of a rude pesticide. The fact that the themes meant to hold it all together – ‘Paradise’, ‘Garden Politics’, ‘Testing Grounds’ and ‘The World as Garden’ – fail to do so is a shame, since some of the work here is excellent.
Andrew Buurman’s portraits of allotment plot holders capture their pride and pragmatism, and there are extraordinary photographs from the first and second world wars, including one of a soldier growing celery in a trench and another of an impeccable garden in a bomb crater in London. There’s a considered display about the Dutch landscape architect Mien Ruys, which includes some original designs for planting within the housing developments in Buitenveldert, a garden suburb in Amsterdam. Her drawings make a nice contrast with the freer sketches by Oudolf shown nearby, and would have been equally well placed in the part on the development of the garden city and the application of Ebenezer Howard’s ideals in apartheid South Africa, Palestine, postcolonial Brazil and, less contentiously, Rosyth.
Where things really go wrong is in the futures. Clever farming solutions aside, these look bleak. This impression is only deepened by oppressive optimism of the labelling. Should we look forward to such things as the ‘Chia Chair’, which ‘is designed to entice us to take a seat but it is actually a bed for chia seeds’? The same applies to the ‘Beatrix Chair’, which is hung above and was designed by Gavin and Alice Munro, who ‘literally grow furniture’. At least it is honestly displayed. It’s not meant to be sat in, so why put it on the floor.
The labelling is also big on the idea of gardens as therapeutic places, which is fair enough, as it’s generally true. Gardens are worth spending time in. If you have one, you’ll know; and if you don’t, you can visit one (they’re often free). That would be a better idea than going to this exhibition.