Enfilade

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Now on view at the BL:

Unearthed: The Power of Gardening

British Library, London, 2 May — 10 August 2025

Curated by Maddy Smith

From beautiful botanical illustrations to the world’s oldest mechanised lawnmower, ancient herbals to guerrilla gardening zines, Unearthed reveals how gardeners have cultivated more than just plants—they’ve sown the seeds of change. Dive into gardening’s role in our health and wellbeing, see how people have reimagined our homes, towns and cities to create green spaces, and uproot the tangled histories of the plants that grow in our gardens today.

Among an incredible collection of books, manuscripts, photographs, artworks and historical tools, highlights include:
• the first English gardening manual: Thomas Hill’s 1558 guide on how to tend a garden
• Charles Darwin’s vasculum, for collecting plant specimens on the Beagle voyage
• the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal
• an oil portrait of John Ystumllyn, one of Britain’s earliest documented Black gardeners
• Gertrude Jekyll’s boots: a trailblazing gardener, writer, artist, and one of the 20th century’s most influential garden designers
• striking botanical art by European, Indian, Chinese, and Caribbean artists
• four short films following Coco Collective, an Afro-diaspora led community garden that opened as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic
• a Victorian Wardian case, the mini travelling greenhouse that enabled thousands of living plant specimens to be moved around the world.

Unearthed celebrates gardening as a force for creativity, resilience, and community through the remarkable stories of the people and plants that shape our gardens.