Dr Marita Bradshaw, National Rock Garden Steering Committee
Published in the National Rock Garden Newsletter No. 28, December 2024
While the NRG takes shape on a hillside in the Bush Capital, another rock garden has opened this year—this one in busy central London. It is the Evolution Garden at the Natural History Museum (NHM), South Kensington. Though different in setting, scale and style, both projects are telling stories about the deep past using rocks and plants and can take visitors on a thought-provoking adventure through time.
Emerging from the tunnel from South Kensington tube station, you find yourself in a canyon constructed out of some of Britain’s oldest rocks, including 2.7-billion-year-old Lewisian Gneiss. Once you emerge out of the rock canyon, you are at the start of a timeline, beginning with the Cambrian period 540 million years ago. Each metre represents 5 million years and rocks, fossils and plants from the different geological periods are displayed. The Natural History Museum’s Evolution Timeline is similar in concept to the Time Walk at Geoscience Australia in Canberra, where the 4.6 billion years of Earth history is laid out over 1.1 kilometres.
Visitors to the Evolution Garden in London will see some familiar Australian plants—tree ferns Dicksonia antarctica, used to invoke the coal-forming Paleozoic forests of ancient Britain and the iconic Wollemi pine Wollemia nobilis, a living fossil from the Cretaceous that has been planted to recreate the Mesozoic environment of the dinosaurs. If you are not heading to London soon, you can walk in a large grove of Wollemi pines a bit closer to home, in Forest 32 at the National Arboretum Canberra.
The NRG is already drawing inspiration from this rock garden on the other side of the world and hopes to further develop this relationship in the years ahead. Anyone visiting London is encouraged to spend some time in the wonderful Evolution Garden at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington.
