Entry 2 - Visiting the Garden

I missed the class trip to the Natural History Museum in Week 2 as I was ill so I decided to go to the museum alone a week later. As I wasn’t being guided by an expert I think this experience was more similar to the traditional garden visitor which gave me a unique perspective compared to that of my classmates. 

I first noticed the contrast between being inside the NHM building and outside in the garden. The inside of the museum is grand and overwhelming from the architecture, exhibits, and crowds, everything demands your attention. Signposting and staff tell you what to look at, structuring your visit, but when you step outside the experience is completely different. People were no longer pushing to see the nearest exhibit and less people had their phones out. People wandered through the gardens not paying too much attention to the signs explaining the ecosystem around them. The garden felt more like a stop gap people went to escape the bustle of the museum rather than a destination. 

Despite the relative lack of interest from visitors compared to inside the museum, the garden is an extremely well monitored green space continuously collecting live data on activity like soil, temperature, sound, and biodiversity. However, the people aimlessly wandering through this data were not interacting with it.

The gap between what the garden is and the strength of the data it collects and how it is perceived by its visitors became a key part of my thinking. Whilst the museum has done a great job exhibiting natural history within the museum building, it seemed this work was missing within the garden which felt like a missed opportunity.

I also noticed a lack of children within the garden. Although I visited during school hours and there were multiple groups of school children and children with parents and guardians throughout the museum itself, there were very few within the garden. This made sense as there was nothing within the garden that seemed suited to children. This observation was a key motivator in deciding to target our design solution towards children, because children were a key museum visitor group for whom the gap between the data the garden collected and the current garden experience felt most impactful. 

After the visit I did more research on the NHM gardens wanting to understand the space better before we met again as a group. One significant finding was learning more about the plants in the garden with the museum's Plants, People and Their Stories project. For this initiative local community members were invited to choose plants they had a personal or cultural connection to to live within the gardens. A plant I hadn’t heard of before, the Moringa plant, was chosen by a member of the local Caribbean community. The plant is known to lower blood pressure. Many of the plants in the garden exist as living objects of personal and cultural significance to members of the local community, one of the project's three domains. The garden was already enriched with community stories, the question became whether with our design solution we could find a way to amplify these stories, we didn’t know yet what form this would take. 

I also did more research into comparable garden projects, landing on the Children's Garden at Kew Gardens. The garden was designed around the question 'what do plants need to grow' and was split into zones: air, earth, water and sun. The garden focuses on creativity rather than playground structures, existing as a functioning garden aimed at children. The NHM gardens were already a similar space, it just had to feel like a destination for children. The children's garden at Kew showed us that children can actively engage with nature in a garden space, raising the bar for what we should be aiming at with our solution. 

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Natural History Museum (no date) Putting down roots: Plants, people and their stories. Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/people-and-plants.html (Accessed: 03 May 2026)

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2019) Children's Garden. Available at: https://www.kew.org (Accessed: 03 May 2026)