Gardens are spaces where imagination quietly takes root, places to stroll, reflect, and remember. Throughout our lives, they have shaped our memories in subtle but powerful ways: the scent of damp earth in our grandparents’ backyard after the rain, the potted geraniums on the balcony that brightened long summers, or the humble allotment where vegetables grew alongside laughter and stories. These green fragments of our past remind us of care, patience and the passage of time. It is this deep emotional connection that V&A Dundee wants to honour in its major exhibition, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, a celebration of the enduring presence of gardens in our personal and collective lives.
The exhibition, on view through January 25th, 2026, offers a rich exploration of the enduring relationship between people and gardens. The museum transforms its galleries into a multisensory celebration of garden design and its influence on everyday life, creativity and wellbeing. The exhibition invites visitors to look beyond the superficial beauty of gardens, revealing their deeper role as spaces of nourishment, resilience, and imagination. Through this lens, they are presented not only as places of leisure or ornamentation, but as living expressions of culture, history and community across time and space.
This vibrant exhibition displays over four hundred fascinating objects, and visitors move among them and are guided through an immersive journey of sound, scent, and light that evokes the experience of being surrounded by nature. The show reveals how gardens have inspired innovation, from the practical ingenuity of kitchen gardens and the revival of allotments to the creative vision of artists such as William Morris. Along the tour, it tells surprising and moving stories about how gardens have served as sanctuaries and given hope in times of social and political unrest. The spaces come to life through evocative installations: an immersive hedge maze, a wooden greenhouse, and a wall woven with floral motifs create a garden in a gallery that captures the sensory essence of being outdoors.
Curated by Francesca Bibby and James Wylie, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature ultimately encourages visitors to reflect on what a garden means to them, whether its shared allotment, a private courtyard or even a single potted plant on a windowsill. The exhibition celebrates the diversity and universality of gardens as sanctuaries, retreats and sources of joy, while highlighting their power to connect people and inspire positive change. By putting together global and Scottish artists, including Piet Oudolf, Andrew Buurman, Derek Jarman, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, or Céline Baumann, Garden Futures reminds us that gardens are far more than cultivated spaces — they are living metaphors for creativity, resilience and our shared responsibility to care for the natural world.
© Stefano Boeri Architetti, Photo: The Blink Fish, 2018
© Studio Céline Baumann
Derek Jarman, Prospect Cottage Garden at Dungeness, Kent, UK, designed from 1986 Photo: Howard Sooley, 1993
Maggie’s Dundee Centre
© Dovecot Studios. Photography by Phil Wilkinson
Piet Oudolf Garden at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany. Photo courtesy of Vitra Design Museum