In 1969, Dan Pearson built his first childhood garden - a small roof garden of succulents for his trolls. It's easy to see, in the work now on show at the Garden Museum, that this was the first of many thoughtful conversations between a site, a client (in this case an imaginary one), and a designer with an intimate relationship with plants. 'I love working on private commissions,' says Pearson, in one of the three lushly produced videos that form the core of the exhibition. Much of his work is primarily accessible only to a privileged few, and thus the videos were conceived to convey an immersive sense of these landscapes to a wider audience. In addition to the videos, there is a cluster of monitors showing drawings and photographs of a variety of projects and, importantly, a long vitrine filled with memorabilia from Pearson's childhood and adolescence, and from his career in gardens, books, and television. What the vitrine gives us is not so much a glimpse of the designer's process on individual projects, but rather the emergence of the designer himself.
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