The Garden Museum’s Festival of Small Nurseries continues with a weekend dedicated to native British wildflowers. Renowned Garden Designer Tom Stuart-Smith’s favourite wildflower nursery, British Wild Flower Plants of Norfolk, will provide a whole weekend of wildflower expertise.

London gardeners will have the opportunity to buy wild flowers that they can immediately plant in their garden. The nursery’s specialism is supplying mixed trays of plug plants that are designed for a specific purpose such as attracting bumblebees and wildlife to the garden or creating a ‘green roof’ or for specific soil types and conditions.

This is a unique opportunity to meet the growers and see their plants as the nursery is not usually open to the public. Whether you would like advice on how to create a mini-wildflower meadow, how to attract butterflies into your garden or which wildflowers would be best to plant around your wildlife pond, the staff will be on hand to answer your queries.

All plants are from known native British origins and in many cases the seed is collected by the nursery itself. Plants will also be available to order.

The Garden Café will serve ‘wild’ food and the Museum displays, shop and the gardens will also be open.

Museum admission charges apply.

THE HIGHGROVE FLORILEGIUM
12th May - 8th September 2009

The summer exhibition at the Garden Museum will be The Highgrove Florilegium: watercolours by over 70 of the leading botanical artists from around the world who have painted plants and trees grown in the garden of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. This first royal Florilegium in the UK is being published in a limited edition raising money for The Prince's Charities Foundation.

The Garden Museum is the first venue for the exhibition of these works, which are loaned, with the kind permission of HRH The Prince of Wales. The exhibition will show contemporary botanical art at its finest.

Distinguished botanists worked with the Head Gardener at Highgrove, to ensure that this great garden is represented in all its aspects by an appropriate selection of material, including plants that are useful or commonplace, rare and in decline, or just extravagantly beautiful. Work was submitted for selection to a rigorous panel of experts led by Anne-Marie Evans MA FLS, who developed the Diploma Course in Botanical Painting at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Botanical illustration can be traced back to herbals in the 6th century AD. Recently, the growing popularity of gardening, and awareness of plant forms and habitat, have led to a renewal of interest in botanical painting and a new Golden Age’ of botanical art.

Museum admission charges apply.

Image: Yvonne Glenister Hammond, Cymbidium © A G Carrick Ltd