Living with plants: Garden Futures at Vitra Design Museum

Weil am Rhein, in the southeasternmost corner of Germany was planned, in part, according to the principles of the Garden City. In 1915, the first phase of its ‘Gartenstadt’ was completed, with modest housing and generous garden allocation for its town’s railway workers. It was designed by Adolf Lorenz, who drew on the ideas behind Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement emerging in England at the time. The spirit of subsistence gardening still prevails in the town’s outskirts. As you walk from the centre towards the Vitra Campus, along the Weilweg and Werner-Panton-Weg, neat villas give way to a vast plain of allotments. Amid makeshift sheds and chicken wire fencing sit flourishing vegetable patches and an assortment of garden deckchairs – a furniture typology that also emerged at the turn of the previous century – for the people who tend them.

The story of gardens as vectors of human activity is told in Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, an exhibition on display at the Vitra Design Museum until 3 October 2023, and which will travel to Helsinki, Värnamo, Rotterdam and Dundee over the next five years. Situated at the entrance of the Vitra Campus, the museum is surrounded by the few cherry trees that remain of the orchard that stood on the site before the Swiss furniture giant took over in 1950. A stone’s throw away is the most recent addition to the campus: a garden planted in 2020 by Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, of High Line fame. Aside from the cherry trees and Oudolf’s conglomeration of wildflowers, shrubs and exquisite grasses, there are no living plants to be encountered in the show. ‘We wanted to make an exhibition about gardens, not of them,’ says curator Viviane Stappmanns.

An installation view of the opening room of Garden Futures: Designing with Nature at Vitra Design Museum

Credit: Ludger Paffrath/Vitra Design Museum

The exhibition design is by Italian design duo Formafantasma

Credit: Ludger Paffrath/Vitra Design Museum

This is clear in the opening room, which Stappmanns refers to as a ‘prologue’ to the show. Here, visitors encounter a confrontation between two types of garden object. On one side, Vitra has mined its vast furniture archive for garden chairs: there is a 19th-century French cast-iron chair intended for use in public parks, Aino Aalto’s birchwood recliner, evocative of leisure and 1930s sun worship, and contemporary outdoor seating, such as Cheick Diallo’s undulating Ségou easy chair, made from nylon and tubular steel in the early 2000s. Each in their own way, these objects suggest that green spaces are places of rest and recreation. On the other side is a wall lined with gardening tools. The oldest is a Swiss 16th-century spade blade, but its design is not all too dissimilar to the 20th and 21st-century tools alongside it. While furniture fashions and tastes in garden design change over time for the leisured classes, gardens have always been sites of invisibilised labour.

The garden, this show contends, is deeply political. Howard’s influential Garden City diagrams make an appearance in the next room: the movement they gave rise to, which swept across industrialised nations in the early the 20th century, argued for ample garden plots and self-sufficiency for workers. But it also exercised a subtle, paternalistic form of social control. ‘Gardening was seen as something that would stop people drinking too much, or being nasty to their families,’ says Stappmanns. ‘There was this huge moralising component to it.’ Later in the century, commercial forces began to impinge on gardening in new ways. Motorised gardening tools and chemical fertilisers and pesticides flooded the market, with the promise of reducing the work involved in ‘taming’ nature. In a cabinet dedicated to this development are examples of chillingly chirpy product, packaging and graphic design for wholly toxic products. ‘What’s the secret to a good lawn?’ asks a 1950s LIFE advertisement from Scotts’ lawn-care programme. ‘It isn’t hard work, and it isn’t lots of money.’

Ebenezer Howard’s ‘three magnets’, one of the diagrams illustrating the concept of the Garden City

A 1950s patriarch using the Scotts Lawn Program to the envy of his neighbours, from a LIFE magazine advertisement

Credit: Andreas Sütterlin/Vitra Design Museum

The obsession, in the west, with a perfectly cropped lawn is only the most recent of atrocities committed in the name of gardening. Garden Futures features a 19th-century Wardian case, the mobile terrarium invented by British amateur botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1829, which was used to transport living plant specimens from colonised nations to colonising ones, transforming local ecosystems irreversibly in the process. Plants were renamed, their Indigenous names replaced by universalising Linnaean nomenclature. Over time, their original contexts were obscured, and many ‘exotic’ plants became staples of gardens design all over the world. But as Luke Keogh, author of the 2020 book The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World, notes in the exhibition catalogue, the case did not only enable the propagation of invasive plant species – it also contained soil, which led to the unintentional and hugely damaging distribution of non-native fungi, mites, nematodes, algae and pathogens. By the mid-20th century, many countries had banned the importation of soils.

In its central ground-floor exhibition space, Garden Futures showcases a number of gardens by professional and amateur gardens. Here are images of filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Kent, and a pile of pebbles from the stark shingle beach on which he cultivated his garden following his HIV diagnosis in 1986. There are displays about much-lauded garden designers and landscape architects such as Oudolf, Brazilian modernist pioneer Roberto Burle Marx, and Dutch garden designer and editor Mien Ruys, as well as lesser-known social initiatives, such as Malaysian landscape architect Ng Sek San’s Kebun-Kebun Bangsar project, which has seen a leftover plot in Kuala Lumpur transformed into a thriving community garden since 2017. This room paints a broad picture of what gardening can look like today, and how it has looked in the recent past.

Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent

Credit: Howard Sooley, 1993

Upstairs, the exhibition turns to the titular ‘futures’ of gardening, and here things become understandably speculative. Many of the problems identified in the opening rooms of the show – the political, commercial, and environmental complexes that arise from human attempts to shape the natural world – are grappled with in varying degrees of abstraction. There are proposed projects for ‘edible neighbourhoods’, school gardening, and urban agroforestry from around the world. But perhaps the most intriguing framing for thinking about garden futures is a host of projects and initiatives that attribute agency – sometimes even legal identity – to plants, pollinators and other natural phenomena. An artwork by French landscape architect Céline Baumann, for example, encourages viewers to imagine what a world run by a ‘parliament of plants’ might look like (it also graces cover of the AR’s June edition); artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker artwork lets users input location, climate, soil and size specifications to an online tool, and receive instructions for how optimise their garden-to-be for flying insects. There are panels on the Swiss politician Lisa Mazzone, who campaigned to give the country’s melting glaciers legal identity in 2017 and while that initiative failed, New Zealand’s Whanganui river was granted legal status in the same year.

‘Throughout history, design plus gardens has equalled a reduction of work,’ says Stappmanns. Given the scale of the environmental catastrophes unfolding across the world, this conception of garden design as a mere tool for optimising human comfort must change. With projects small and large, from individual actions to wider legal frameworks, Garden Futures gestures towards a future in which ‘gardens plus design’ is a less harmful equation.