Held this year on the 13th of April, the popular plant fair has been held at the Garden Museum for over forty years, celebrating the arrival of spring and the start of the gardening calendar.
Providing inspiration for city gardeners, the Garden Museum’s Spring Plant Fair features the much loved Great Dixter Nursery and Beth Chatto’s Plants & Gardens, as well as a range of nurseries and plant specialists catering for plants for shade, attracting pollinators, garden, balcony or allotment.
Stallholders include: Great Dixter Nursery, Beth Chatto’s Plants & Gardens, Vegelicious of Hadleigh & Benton Irises, Moore & Moore, Zophian Plants, Leahurst Nursery, Bright Green Fox, Cally Gardens, Edimentals, Glendon Nursery, Hardy’s Plants, Harts of Lee, Garden & Wood, Kew Plantsman, Niwaki, Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, Friends of Arnold Circus and Plant Heritage
Talks & Workshops
A programme of talks and workshops will be held during the fair on growing annuals, seed sowing and increasing wildlife and biodiversity in small spaces, as well as cookery demos in the Garden Museum’s Studio kitchen. The programme was curated in association with the garden designer Susanna Grant and is supported by public funding from the Arts Council England.
Workshop programme:
- Unlocking the Power of Youth-led Nature Recovery. This session will talk through the benefits of teaming up with young people for undertaking nature recovery work, how you can do it on sites you own or manage, and upcoming future opportunities. Facilitated by Youngwilders – a youth-led non-profit accelerating UK nature recovery and involving young people in the process and movement
- A World of Sweet Peas – Join UK Sweet Pea breeder and grower Phil Johnson, and Swedish Sweet Pea authority Cecilia Wingard, who have combined their abundant bouquet of knowledge, to create a new 240-page floral bible, A World of Sweet Peas, which is bursting with fascinating information on why this annual scent sensation, has become so beloved and cultivated around the globe.
- Becoming Kin – Join gardener, Sui Searle and Shama Khanna a London-based artist, educator and garden designer who grows, as they discuss how gardening might help to connect us to a sense of place, to ourselves, to each other and to our more-than-human kin.
- Fruity Walks. Urban fruit tree forager Divya Hariramani will be taking small groups on a journey around Lambeth to showcase the urban fruit trees, the stories behind how they arrived and the people who planted them.
- Power in the Land. Food grower and writer Claire Ratinon talks about organising around workers’ rights as a member of Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) which is a grassroots trade union fighting for better standards of pay, working conditions and cultures for those in land-related trades. Whether you are a volunteer, gardener, grower or landscape architect, this is an informal space for anyone involved in gardening to find out more
- Setting Up a Micro Nursery. Hannah Fox worked at Marchants Hardy Plants for 10 years, primarily as a propagator/gardener but ended up running the business. Fox has now set up her own micro-nursery, Bright Green Fox, from her own garden, using every bit of space she has available. She will share her tips for making the most of a limited space, being choosy with plants, getting the right kit and keeping track of it all, with a few propagation techniques thrown in along the way.
- Public Planting and How to do it Better – After setting up his own nursery Zophian Plants and frustrated by the often limited plant palette for drought free planting, Toby Shuall has been researching plant species that provide food and habitat for wildlife, are drought tolerant, hardy and look great. His focus is on exploring different low intervention ways – working with sand and aggregates – to create low maintenance, high impact plantings. This is an essential talk for anyone interested in greening cities, low intervention gardening for wildlife or a south-facing garden they don’t know how to plant.
Founded in 1977, the Garden Museum is home to the Archive of Garden Design, which preserves and provides access to the working records of leading British garden designers of the 20th and 21st century. Housed in the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, the Garden Museum contains the burial place of John Tradescant, an early gardener and plant hunter. At the heart of the Museum is a sheltered courtyard garden designed by Dan Pearson as an ‘Eden’ of rare plants.
Further details of the Garden Museum’s Spring Fair 2025 can be found here.
