Garden Futures: Designing with Nature

Before you step into Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, prepare to enter a parallel world, both removed from everyday life and deeply connected to it. Expect to feel safe and comforted, at home but also surprised. This is a dense, multi-sensory exhibition packed with visuals and words, sounds and smells. From community allotments to war-zone green patches, from high-concept ecological design to poetic garden sanctuaries, this exhibition reveals how the practice of gardening, in all its variety, shapes, soothes, and enriches our lives. Because no, this is not just about flower beds and potting sheds. 

From tree to chair - an example of design rooted in nature. Photo: Amandine Vincent.

Bringing the garden indoors with Morris’s timeless celebration of nature and craft. Photo: Amandine Vincent.

What really stands out is the versatility of the visiting experience. Each room is its own immersive universe, spacious and calming, interrupted only (and joyfully so) by the bird-song instruments that adults and children alike can’t resist trying out. Boxes of floral scents invite curious noses, ambient soundtracks follow the journey, and an expertly curated palette of vibrant and muted colours energises without overwhelming.

Gardening tools, outdoor furniture, and artworks inspired by nature sit side by side, blurring the lines between the natural and the crafted. There is even a chance to feel the art, but I will stop there, you will experience it for yourself.

Hands on and eyes wide, gaming connects to nature too. Photo: Amandine Vincent.

This is a show for everyone, even if perhaps the title risks underselling it to non-gardeners. Whether you are a green-thumbed plant enthusiast, a techie, a social-rights activist (have you ever thought about the rights of trees?) or just a curious soul, there is plenty here to engage with. Interactive games, video installations and audio recordings, innovative technologies and fashion pieces, all cohabit alongside books to flick through, benches to rest on, and inspiration to take away. I was grateful (and surprised!) that my primary-aged children let us spend two hours inside with barely a moan. Still, I left feeling both fulfilled and tired, a little frustrated too by the sheer amount of content on offer and the limits of my own capacity to take it in.

Without a doubt, this show will stand out as one of my 2025 cultural highlights, as a cross-era, cross-border exploration of how we live, solve problems, and heal with nature, by learning from past initiatives, finding inspiration in present challenges, and imagining future possibilities. My next mission? Spreading the word to friends and family, reminding them how lucky we are that this exhibition, on its European tour, is stopping in Scotland until January 2026. That’s plenty of time to visit - and probably even revisit.

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The exhibition is on until 25th of January 2026 at V&A Dundee. For more information on the concept of the exhibition, visit Vitra Design Museum.