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The Guardian view on gallery and museum gardens: a blooming triumph

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yesterday

Never mind a gnome, no other garden at this year’s Chelsea flower show can boast a Barbara Hepworth sculpture like the RHS gold-award-winning Tate Britain garden. And few will have such a significant afterlife. Designed by the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, it is a microcosm of a major redesign for the gallery’s Millbank garden, opening next spring.

Visitors to Tate Britain may be forgiven for not noticing that the 1897 gallery has a garden at all. The imposing steps and portico overshadow two rectangles of lawn. But this unloved patch will be transformed into a horticultural haven. The gallery, which like many has struggled to recover visitor numbers since the pandemic, could do with a boost.

As the recent, highly successful Turner and Constable exhibition showed, there is no shortage of natural splendours inside its walls. The new garden design was partly inspired by Victor Pasmore’s painting The Green Earth (1979-80). However, the planting is more exotic than you........

© The Guardian