a sneak preview of the Clore garden<\/a> when a condensed version was shown at the Royal Horticultural Society\u2019s (RHS) annual Chelsea Flower Show, in May. Here, under the moniker of The Tate Britain Garden, it was awarded a gold medal, to add to the other nine Stuart-Smith has already picked up at Chelsea over the years. Sitting at the heart of the Tate Britain Garden was Barbara Hepworth\u2019s 1949 limestone sculpture Bicentric Form, the first time that a work of art from the national collection has been exhibited within a garden at the Chelsea Flower show. This work, along with other modern and contemporary pieces from Tate\u2019s collection, will also be a key part of the Clore Garden back in Millbank. Stuart Smith describes it as \u201cin some ways a sculpture garden\u201d while admitting that he’s \u201cnot a great one for sculpture and flowers, so I\u2019m using foliage and plant forms to calm things down\u2014the sculptures will be more like incidental things that you discover\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/53d68b84d0b068c0a2aba7e19e0582f9b33a21c7-2000x1333.jpg\"\/)
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The Tate Britain Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 Photo: Jason Ingram<\/p>\n
Stuart-Smith\u2014who has designed gardens for the Hepworth Wakefield and Chatsworth House as well as the Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Garden at Windsor Castle, amongst many others\u2014also looked to the Tate\u2019s collection for inspiration. In early presentations to Tate he cited The Green Earth (1979\u201380), a painting by Victor Pasmore that depicts a series of cellular green forms linked by the occasional black line, which informed the informal, organic ethos of the landscape architect’s final design.<\/p>\n
Another key influence was Merlin Sheldrake\u2019s book Entangled Life (2020), which explores how networks of fungal mycelia connect and hold together much of our world. This fed into Stuart-Smith\u2019s scheme for a network of narrow waterways punctuated by small bubbling circular dishes which will flow around the garden\u2019s green spaces and ultimately feed into a bowl-shaped water feature on a terrace outside the Tate Britain caf\u00e9. \u201cI started looking at microscopic images of mycelium and quite a lot of them have little bacterial nodules on the end, so these branching rills are my little bacterial nodules\u2014it\u2019s a nice metaphor for the garden bringing everyone together,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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Year 4 pupils with their artwork on the hoardings surrounding Tate Britain\u2019s Clore Garden, currently under construction and due to open in 2027 Photo \u00a9 Tate Photography (Sonal Bakrania)<\/p>\n
This social role of the Clore garden is echoed by Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson who sees it as a crucial means to make the museum\u2019s neoclassical, 19th-century building more welcoming to a wider community. \u201cWe want to make our fa\u00e7ade as porous as possible,\u201d he states. \u201cThe environmental aspect of the garden is key, but so is the dialogue between the garden and a building which, when you arrive, can seem quite intimidating and doesn\u2019t exactly signal contemporaneity.\u201d <\/p>\n
As well as making the garden more sustainable as London\u2019s climate heats and dries, Farquharson also hopes the worldwide scope of its planting will mean that this new green space will engage with many more people: \u201cIt opens up the garden to a global population as well as Tate\u2019s increasingly global programme,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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An aerial view of the designs for the Tate Britain Clore Garden Image courtesy of Tom Stuart-Smith Studio<\/p>\n
A key expression of Clore Garden\u2019s aim to attract new audiences is a specially designated outdoor classroom\u2014furnished with a \u2018learning circle\u2019 of benches cast from reused materials including Tate\u2019s existing paving and locally sourced shells from the nearby Thames foreshore. This learning space is conceived to fit a class of 30 schoolchildren. <\/p>\n
There are also plans for a single-storey, lightweight garden classroom designed by the architecture studio Feilden Fowles, which will host an extensive education programme and workshops for school groups and adult learners devised in association with the Royal Horticultural Society. \u201cWe\u2019ll be emphasising the links between nature and art all the time,\u201d Farquharson says, adding that he is \u201clooking forward to people going round the collection and naming plants\u201d. He also hopes that the garden will point to \u201cthe long ecological theme in British art going back to the landscape tradition and beyond, and also forward to the eco-critical practices of Richard Long and Cooking Sections. Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth wouldn\u2019t have used these forms without looking closely at nature.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turning to the sea<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, on England\u2019s south coast, Turner Contemporary has been looking out to sea. Situated on Margate\u2019s waterfront\u2014on almost exactly the same site of the boarding house from where JMW Turner admired the North Sea views a couple of centuries earlier\u2014Turner Contemporary is on the frontline of environmental change, directly experiencing the challenges of rising seas and coastal erosion.<\/p>\n
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On Friday 19 June, 150 pupils from five local primary schools gathered at Turner Contemporary for the One Ocean 2026 Schools Day, the opening event of this year’s One Ocean programme Courtesy of Turner Contemporary; photo:John Sainsburyl \u00a9 Turner Contemporary<\/p>\n
Last weekend (19-21 June) the gallery joined forces with the UK National Commission for Unesco to host One Ocean 2026, a programme of free public talks, workshops, artist and documentary film screenings and more, all devoted to exploring humanity\u2019s relationship with the ocean and addressing the urgent challenges facing marine environments in Margate and beyond. Bringing together a network of international and regional collaborators spanning artists, scientists, policymakers, activists, campaigners and local leaders, One Ocean\u2014in the words of Toby Parkin, Turner Contemporary\u2019s head of learning and participation\u2014created \u201ca space for hope and collaboration […] empowering people (especially young people) to see themselves as part of the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s inaugural gathering was a pilot, but the plan is to develop One Ocean into a biennial programme of international significance. This would establish Turner Contemporary as a global \u2018ideas hub\u2019 devoted to ocean health, biodiversity and climate resilience, alongside its existing role as a beacon of artistic excellence. <\/p>\n
As with Tate\u2019s Clore Garden, both of these excellent and long term initiatives underline yet again the fact that environmental and cultural considerations should not be viewed as mutually exclusive but complementary, intertwined and symbiotic. And it seems to be our institutions rather than our governments that are leading the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is now standard practice for public institutions to consider the environment within their buildings and across their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,528,329,32807,662,663,721,649,32808],"class_list":["post-71502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-environment","tag-gardens","tag-green-is-the-new-black","tag-museums","tag-museums-heritage","tag-sustainability","tag-tate-britain","tag-turner-contemporary"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116820356881099397","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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