Qualla: Garden Museum

Garden Museum: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. In 1976, Rosemary Nicholson went looking for a grave. She had read that the 17th-century royal gardeners John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger, plant hunters who introduced the tulip tree and the spiderwort to England, were buried in a churchyard at Lambeth. When she found St Mary-at-Lambeth boarded up and scheduled for demolition, with the Tradescants' tomb crumbling in the weeds, she did not simply pay her respects. She set out to save the church, and in the process invented a museum that had never existed before: the world's first dedicated to the history of gardens.

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Image: anonymous | Public domain

Garden Museum: The Tomb That Started a Movement

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tradescant tomb is a strange, beautiful thing. Carved with crocodiles and broken columns, ruined temples and exotic shells, it reads like a stone inventory of the wonders the father-and-son gardeners had ferried back to England from Virginia, Algiers, and the Low Countries. T...

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Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 4.0

Garden Museum: A Church on the Thames

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Scarth from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Mary-at-Lambeth sits directly opposite the Palace of Westminster, tucked against the high brick wall of Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishops of Canterbury have lived for eight centuries. A church has stood here since before the Norman Conquest. By the 19th century the parish ...

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Image: Robert Scarth from London, England | CC BY-SA 2.0

Garden Museum: Captain Bligh and Other Neighbours

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Barr, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Tradescants are not alone in the churchyard. Vice-Admiral William Bligh, the captain whose name is fastened forever to the mutiny on the Bounty, lies a few paces away beneath a tomb carved with a breadfruit. He had spent his career trying to ship breadfruit seedlings from Tah...

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Image: Peter Barr | CC BY-SA 2.0

Garden Museum: The Coffins Under the Floor

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hank chapot at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. During the museum's 2016 redevelopment, workmen lifted a section of paving and discovered a vault no one had recorded. Inside lay thirty coffins, including five that belonged to Archbishops of Canterbury. Richard Bancroft, who oversaw the production of the King James Bible, was a...

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Image: Hank chapot at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Garden Museum: Gardens and Galleries

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosakoalaglitzereinhorn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The redevelopment that uncovered the archbishops also reshaped the museum itself. Galleries doubled, a viewing platform now caps the medieval tower, and Dan Pearson laid out the Sackler Garden in the courtyard, planting modern equivalents of the Tradescants' own discoveries. Chri...

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Image: Rosakoalaglitzereinhorn | CC BY-SA 3.0