Several sources of funding including The Art Fund have enabled us to collect South Border at Munstead Wood (c.1900), a watercolour by Helen Allingham accurately depicting part of her friend Jekyll’s celebrated garden.

Since 2008 funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (Collecting Cultures) has enabled the Museum to greatly strengthen its holdings of designs and artists’ views of gardens.  Pictures by the photographer Martin Parr, prints by Anthony Gross, a Dig for Victory poster and many more art works have also been added to the collection through this fund.

Other highlights include the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, thought until the eighteenth century to be a cross between an animal and a vegetable (it is actually the root-like stem of a variety of fern), and many unusual garden tools, from Neolithic implements to a Victorian cucumber straightener.  

The Museum also holds a number of rare books, including the diarist John Evelyn’s personal copy of the Musaeum Tradescantianum, the seventeenth-century catalogue of the museum collection of the John Tradescants (whose tomb is in the Museum garden), as well as a Hortus siccus, a mid-seventeenth-century herbarium once owned by the botanist Dr John Fothergill.