All is Leaf

This week, Gemma Anderson-Tempini's All is Leaf  went up in the Garden History Room at Tresco Abbey Gardens. The exhibition documents some of the unique hybrid plants on Tresco and invites visitors to explore the gardens and learn about botanical illustration, helping to create a new wall of plant drawings inspired by the abbey’s historic collection of plants from around the world.

"As part of our Museum on the Move programme," says Museum Director Lydia Bassett, "we’re working across the islands creating new installations and interpretation to help share each island’s unique story. On Tresco we’re working with artist and academic Dr Gemma Anderson-Tempini to transform the island’s Garden History room into an interactive hub where visitors engage directly with Tresco's botanical, historical, and maritime past."

"Alongside the drawings," continues Lydia, "there is a garden hybrid drawing guide - Plants that Exist Nowhere Else - for visitors to take round the gardens; a table set up for drawing, resting and reflecting; and a vitrine holding the list of works, a framed work, and related material. There is also a digital guide, revealing the first documentation of Tresco's unique hybrids through photography and photogrammetry 3D models."

"Huge thanks to everyone at the Garden Café and Shop and to the gardeners for all their help, and a special thank you to Layan Harman for helping to install the works."

After first visiting Tresco in 2012 as a drawing lecturer from Falmouth University, Gemma was astounded by the range of the plants on the island and could not help but stop and draw wherever she went. "It felt like the flora I had been encountering in Cornwall, magnified and intensified, concentrated in one extraordinary place. I came back with a series of etchings and drawings, some of which you can see here."

Two visits later, Gemma's connection to the islands was deepened further and, in time, she returned with her family in tow, beginning a new tradition of annual camping trips. 

"When the opportunity arose to apply for this commission," Gemma says, "I leapt at it. Returning to the gardens in 2025, I asked Head Gardener Andrew Lawson whether there were any hybrid plants specific to Tresco. He told me there were six or seven, and that they had never previously been documented. This felt like exactly the right place to begin. These were plants that existed nowhere else, forms that had come into being through the particular conditions of this garden, through the proximity of species from over eighty countries brought together by centuries of collecting. This exhibition documents the first systematic record of those hybrids through photogrammetry models, observational drawings, etchings, and watercolours. But the theme of hybridity reaches further than botany. The question of what makes a plant native is entirely dependent on where and when in time you look. Many species we now consider native were once arrivals. And beneath what is visibly distinctive, there are many more hybrids in these gardens that leave no obvious trace: gene pools are always mixing, plants are always evolving, forms are always in the process of becoming something new. The hybrid is not an exception. It is closer to the rule."

Without funding from the National Heritage Lottery, Foyle Foundation and Arts Council England, this wonderful project would not have been possible and we hope that many of you get to visit the space over the coming months and see the exhibition in action.