A gallery of treasures
Serpentine Sackler Gallery Garden, Kensington Gardens, London W2 A vibrant, seasonally changing garden by Arabella Lennox-boyd sets off to perfection Zaha Hadid’s elegant building, finds Non Morris
The gallery and garden work in harmony at London’s Serpentine Sackler, says Non Morris
The Serpentine Sackler Gallery stands at the kink of West Carriage Drive, the red-tarmacked road that swoops through Kensington Gardens in London’s W2. The yellow-brick neo-classical building, with its Palladian portico, is a broad and solid presence behind the glossy black railings. Settling lightly upon its more sheltered side is a fluid, bright-white extension with a roof that dips repeatedly down to the ground and whose rounded walls are made of watery-blue glass.
The extension was designed by the late pioneering architect Zaha hadid and it remains her only permanent building in central London. When the Royal Parks offered a lease for the former gunpowder store in 2009—the building had more recently provided rather grand storage for the Mall’s flagpoles— the Serpentine Gallery jumped at the chance to develop a sister contemporary art gallery only five minutes’ walk away, across the lake. Conservation architect Liam O’connor advised on the conversion of the military magazine itself into an elegant exhibition space and long-standing Serpentine collaborator hadid (she designed the original Serpentine Pavilion in 2000) created an extension to be used as a restaurant and event space.
The Serpentine Sackler Gallery opened in 2013. Determined to ensure that the compact space around it would be sensitively and dynamically planted—wherever you are within the extension, there are views out through the sea-coloured glass—the gallery turned to eminent landscape designer Arabella Lennox-boyd, whom they also knew well (she’d designed the landscape around the 2005 Serpentine Pavilion).
The garden is a clever and subtle success. From the road, the gallery itself feels clean and uncluttered, but pass through the iron gates and turn left to the hadid extension, and you realise that a gentle wave of green upon green planting has started to build. A generous, flat-topped loop of clipped box is echoed by a softly arching low hedge of
Pennisetum Fairy Tails. This excellent evergreen fountain grass is used generously throughout the garden. By late summer, its elongated grey-plum flowerheads provide a hazy rhythm of their own and the movement of the glossy, light reflecting leaves animates the surrounding space.
Further layers of green are provided by a velvety yew boundary hedge. This is the perfect foil to the stretch of silvery-leaved
Miscanthus sinensis Morning Light and feels robust enough to hold back the monumental horse chestnuts that seem to press in around the boundaries.
If the front garden mirrors the curves of the hadid roof in a low-slung stretched-out kind of way, it’s an enjoyable surprise to squeeze your way past the side of the building (the roof here touches the ground) and be waved invitingly forward by majestic, flag-like stands of the refined pampas grass
Cortaderia richardii. This is a triumph. earlier in the year, it reads as dynamic mounds of curving leaves, but, by late summer, statuesque, 8ft high, oaty-white plumes reach for the sky and are a brilliant partner for the molten white tensile roof they frame. I love the way the pampas grass is reflected, a hovering collage of white shapes, in the clear blue bullnose of glass wall opposite.
here, at the back of the building, sinuous raised beds edged in dark, powder-coated steel provide space for a colourful tapestry of herbaceous planting. The plant selection has had to be impeccable as the borders must look good throughout the year. The
shift in mood is marked by a sculptural stepped buttress of bay—laurus nobilis— next to which the delicately veined, palepink-flowered Geranium Dreamland, which has a particularly long flowering season, spills down almost to the ground.
Further along, there are overhanging mounds of purple Origanum laevigatum Herrenhausen, another hardworking plant that has fine wiry seedheads in autumn and whose foliage in this sheltered spot should remain all winter. Behind these stand the skinny coral-pink tapers of Persicaria amplexicaulis Firedance, neat rosy heads of Allium sphaerocephalon and the almost luminous pink of Dianthus carthusianorum.
Elsewhere, the same pink allium heads are matched with the rich-apricot Kniphofia Tawny King; the deep-violet Agastache Blackadder, flowering from July to October, is a regal foil to the airy Thalictrum delavayi Album, frothy white in midsummer, its bright green foliage turning to lacy gold in the autumn. There are scillas, crocuses and tiny narcissi for spring and dashes of electric-blue Ceratostigma willmottianum and the very-late-flowering Aster divaricatus to stretch the season as late as possible.
Lady Lennox-boyd is well known for championing shrubs and trees in gardens, so it’s no surprise to find some fine specimens here: a Cornus kousa Variegata lighting up one corner and a Cornus Norman Hadden, laden with orange-red strawberry-like fruit, nestling in another. A mature sweet chestnut with its canopy lifted to display its gnarled bark is simply underplanted with the blue
Geranium Brookside, hart’s tongue ferns and the evergreen grass Sesleria autumnalis, whose foliage becomes lime green in the autumn.
At the back of the garden, there is a white painted wall making a a brilliantly simple backdrop to the tiny rice-like seed heads and flushed-red foliage of the lovely switch grass Panicum virgatum Rehbraun.
The Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist is delighted: ‘Arabella’s garden flows around Zaha’s architecture and echoes its form. It introduces both an energy and sense of calm: Arabella is a master of creating gardens of dynamic tranquility.’
Serpentine Galleries: 020–7402 6075; www.serpentinegalleries.org