The Archive of Garden Design was opened in 2019 to preserve and provide access to the working records of the 20th and 21st century’s leading British garden designers, together with the writers and photographers who interpreted their work. To reflect that gardens vanish or change with their owners over time, the Garden Museum looked to preserve those gardens for future generations by collecting this rich body of garden design material.
The collection began with the archives of notable garden and landscape designers such as Penelope Hobhouse, Beth Chatto, John Brookes, Russell Page and Janet Jack, providing a unique record of their careers, working practices and the projects they produced as well as many unrealised garden designs. The archives of writers Joy Larkcom, Alan Titchmarsh and Paul Miles, as well as photographers like Andrew Lawson, who interpreted and documented garden designers’ work soon followed. Since then the Garden Museum’s collections have continued to grow to include horticultural suppliers Elphick’s of Lewes and William Wood & Sons, and many more.
The catalogue is now online and allows to search the archive holdings in detail, find items of interest and if needed contact the Garden Museum to visit the archive in person. Not exhaustive, the archive catalogue is consistently being updated.
