Free public museum garden opens
Acutting-edge garden at an arts museum in West Yorkshire has opened to great acclaim. ‘The Hepworth Wakefield Garden’, designed by internationally renowned landscape architect and designer Tom StuartSmith, is now open and is free to visitors. The £1.8 million walkthrough garden next to the museum covers 13,106 sq m (43,000 sq ft) and used over 14,000 herbaceous plants and shrubs, 120m (394ft) of beech hedging and 52 trees, all carefully chosen for their colour and form.
Early-flowering varieties such as Japanese cherry and magnolia, along with snowdrops and hellebores, gives way to naturalistic meadow-style planting with echinacea, aster, coreopsis and eryngium, along with alliums and ornamental grasses. Trees such as Cornus kousa and amelanchier will provide autumn colour.
The garden will also provide the outdoor stage for the museum’s first sculptures, including namesake Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Ascending Form (Gloria)’, Lynn Chadwick’s ‘Dancing Figures’ and Sir Michael Craig-Martin’s ‘Pitchfork (Yellow)’. The garden will be home to a rolling programme of exhibits.
The museum is also restoring a Grade II listed gatehouse on site as a café and developing a garden studio as a creative hub to teach horticultural skills to more than 30 students from local schools and community groups, led by the venue's first cultural gardener Katy Merrington, who will also look after the garden. Completion of the facility is aimed for spring 2020.
“We are creating an inspiring, safe and calming space in which visitors can create, relax and reflect,” said museum director Simon Wallis.