Rooted: Global Gardens and Their Communities

The act of gardening is a form of hope: To garden is to invest in the future of a place, whether a sprawling country estate or an apartment window box. Gardens reflect the human impulse to collaborate with, and sometimes dominate, nature, and throughout history they have served as sites of refuge, sources of food and medicine, and symbols of status and legacy. Gardens also transcend the physical world. Across cultures, divine places, from origins to afterlifes, are imagined as a lush paradise of abundance, harmony, and a perfected vision of nature. The Qur’an describes the four gardens of Paradise; the Bible and Torah offer the Garden of Eden; the immortal lands of Chinese mythology feature flora and fauna laden with symbolic meaning.

This exhibition considers the meaning of gardens across cultures and across time. The objects in this gallery thus reflect the many roles these spaces have played in human life: as a spiritual symbol and social space, as a practical resource and private refuge, as a metaphor for the cycles of life. Together they trace a global conversation in which aesthetics, ideas, and plants themselves have traveled across borders like seeds in the wind.

Rooted: Global Gardens and Their Communities is curated by Rosamund Garrett, Ph.D., Head of Collections, Chester Beatty, with support from Mallory Sharp, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Mississippi.

All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund: Lead support provided by Kay Clark, and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with additional funding from Anonymous, Irene and Ron Ayotte, Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Susan and James Edelman, Debi and Galen Havner, Sally Hergenrader, James R. Humphreys, Betty and George Johnson, Kristen and Jay Keegan, Valerie and Carl Person, Deborah D. Tipton, Bill Townsend, and the Doris S. and Hubert Kiersky Charitable Remainder Trust.