Garden Futures: Designing with Nature
V&A Dundee is inviting visitors to step into a world where nature, design and imagination meet, with its major 2025 exhibition Garden Futures: Designing with Nature.
Bringing together more than 400 objects, immersive installations, fragrances of rose and jasmine drifting through the air, and stories that span centuries and continents, Garden Futures asks: what can a garden be? The answer, it turns out, is as expansive as nature itself.
From the tranquil courtyards of Persian paradises to Scotland’s own Maxwell Community Garden and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic Little Sparta, the exhibition journeys through time and place, uncovering how gardens have nourished bodies, lifted spirits and sparked social change. Historic treasures like an ancient Iranian tile panel rub shoulders with contemporary creativity—from Dior menswear inspired by the Bloomsbury Group’s Charleston garden to dresses grown from wheatgrass roots by designer Zena Holloway.
Copyright – Grant Anderson / www.grantanderson.me / @grantandersondotme
Visitors can explore stories of community resilience, healing landscapes and experimental green spaces in surprising places: vertical forests on Milan skyscrapers, videogame gardens built by Dundee’s own Biome Collective, and the sustainable seaweed gardens off Oban’s coast. Highlights include the pioneering designs of Piet Oudolf, known for his wild yet meticulous planting style, and Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s peaceful landscape for Maggie’s Dundee cancer care centre.
Leonie Bell, Director of V&A Dundee, describes the show as “blooming with design stories” and hopes it will inspire everyone, seasoned gardeners and green-fingered novices alike, to reimagine what a garden can mean. “Gardens are both everyday and extraordinary,” she says, “reflecting the times we live in and our relationship with nature.”
Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney praised the exhibition’s timely message, highlighting how gardens—whether lush allotments or tiny window boxes—offer sanctuary and joy, while reminding us of the importance of connecting with nature for our wellbeing and the planet’s future.
Stefano Boeri, Bosco Verticale, Milan, 2014
Originally created by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation and the Nieuwe Instituut, Garden Futures has been reimagined in Dundee with new Scottish stories and cutting-edge sustainable design innovations, such as Glasgow’s POTR self-watering pots made from marine waste.
Visitors won’t just observe—they’ll step into a ‘garden in a gallery,’ winding through hedge mazes, greenhouses and living walls. There’s even the chance to ‘grow’ a virtual musical garden or design pollinator-friendly planting schemes using interactive digital tools.
At a time when many of us are rediscovering the simple joys of tending a plant or growing our own food, Garden Futures invites us to see gardens not only as places of beauty but as powerful spaces for hope, resilience and positive change.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature runs at V&A Dundee from 17 May 2025 to 25 January 2026.
Header: Céline Baumann, Parliament of Plants, 2020 © Studio Céline Baumann
