Featuring gardens by designers and artists, such as Roberto Burle Marx, Jamaica Kincaid, Mien Ruys, Piet Oudolf and Derek Jarman, the Garden Futures exhibition celebrates gardens as an idyllic retreat, but also as a testing ground for new ideas and experiments in biodiversity, social justice and sustainability.
Featured in the exhibition is the garden of Brazilian landscape architect, Roberto Burle Marx which grew into an experimental landscape laboratory where he played with volume, colour, texture and perspective. Burle Marx was accredited with having introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil, and known for being a modern nature artist and designer of public urban green spaces. Also featured, is the Vermont garden of the Antiguan–American writer and gardener, Jamaica Kincaid, which has been a place of connection with her own history and memories of the past 30 years. Derek Jarman’s cherished garden also features, which was created in the face of his own mortality at the height of the AIDS crisis. Since his death in 1994, Jarman’s garden has become a site of pilgrimage for art students, architects and garden designers.
The exhibition was developed in collaboration with Vitra Design Museum and the Wüstenrot Foundation – previously on show at Vitra in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The current, Dutch edition of the exhibition, held in the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, includes works by garden and landscape designers Michael van Gessel and Henk Gerritsen, as well as Rotterdam gardens and landscapes such as the garden village of Vreewijk, and current nature-inclusive design initiatives such as Brienenoord Island, Wijktuin Ommoord, Hofbogen and The New Garden.
The exhibition also looks to gardens that have been shaped by political or commercial interests, such as the colonial trade that introduced tropical plants in the 19th century, the vegetable garden as a form of self-sufficiency and food security during times of war and scarcity. Garden Futures also looks into how tastes have adapted to the promises made by manufacturers of garden tools, fertilisers and patio furniture.
Looking to the the gardens of today and tomorrow, the exhibition explores how the garden is increasingly seen as part of an ecological system, rather than simply a demarcated piece of land. Subsequently, much experimentation is taking place with alternative, sustainable gardening concepts featured in the exhibition such as conservatories, vertical forests, community gardens, floating gardens, school gardens, rooftop greenhouses, food forests, urban farms and forest gardens.
The Garden Futures exhibition, runs from the 15th of November until the 12th of April 2025, in the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The Nieuwe Instituut is a national museum for architecture, design and digital culture, dating from 1933. Located in Museumpark, the Nieuwe Instituut focuses on major developments in society, such as the housing shortage, the climate crisis, and the emergence of artificial intelligence.