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Next year V&A Dundee will show a new UK-first exhibition exploring the history of modern garden design, unearthing the important role gardens play in all our lives and how our outdoor spaces can shape a greener, more imaginative future.

Garden Futures: Designing with Nature (opens 17 May 2025 – ticketed), explores gardens from across the globe and how they have influenced the way we design and inhabit gardens today. Highlighting key moments of inspiration and innovation in gardening and garden design from the 20th century to present day, as well as artworks and design inspired by gardens, Garden Futures considers the garden as much more than a place to retreat, but also a place where ideas for a more sustainable future can be tried and tested. It features some of the world’s most pioneering gardens alongside the work of international designers, landscape architects and artists who think of gardens as places to test ideas to make a better world.

This sumptuous, colour-filled exhibition will take visitors on an illuminating journey exploring the history and future of gardens, looking at examples of groundbreaking gardens by visionaries including Piet Oudolf, Mien Ruys, Derek Jarman and Eelco Hooftman. A fascinating collection of ceramics, fashion, painting, textiles, sculpture, interior design, drawings and photographs show how the enduring allure of gardens influences artists, writers and designers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Duncan Grant and William Morris.​

Community-led projects in Scotland including Maxwell Community Garden, part of the Grow Dundee food growing and community garden network, and Oban’s Seaweed Gardens will feature alongside work by Charles Jencks and the garden designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd at Maggie’s Centre, Dundee.

Garden Futures will also look ahead, exploring what the future of gardens could look like, offering a fascinating insight into the power of gardens and how our outdoor spaces can be part of a better future.

Garden Futures: Designing with Nature is an exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Nieuwe Instituut.

A Fragile Correspondence (opens 22 November 2024 – free) From the forests around Loch Ness, to the seashore of the Orkney archipelago and the industrialised remnants of the Ravenscraig steelworks, A Fragile Correspondence is a journey through three Scottish landscapes across the Highlands, Islands and Lowlands mapping a collection of creative responses by architects, artists and writers. Exploring the complex relationship between land, architecture and language, A Fragile Correspondence seeks new ways of working in connection with the land rather than simply upon it.

Responding to the theme Laboratory of the Future, this project was selected to represent Scotland at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, an international exhibition inviting participants to engage with ideas for the environments we live in.

Commissioned by the Scotland + Venice partnership and curated by a creative team consisting of the Architecture Fringe, -ism magazine, and /other, this will be the first opportunity to see A Fragile Correspondence in full in Scotland.

The Dundee Tapestry (opens 1 November 2024 – free). The complete Dundee Tapestry was first revealed to the public earlier this year, with over 86,000 people coming to V&A Dundee while the tapestry was on show.

Returning to the Michelin Design Gallery at V&A Dundee in response to its ongoing popularity with visitors from near and far, the Dundee Tapestry tells the story of the city’s industrial heritage, creative achievements, biodiversity and people through 35 beautifully hand-stitched panels. Created by over 140 volunteer stitchers, with many taking up a needle and thread for the first time, together, they have collaborated to tell Dundee’s unique story, stitch by stitch.

The Dundee Tapestry was conceived and developed by John Fyffe MBE of the Weaver Incorporation of Dundee. The panels were co-designed by Dr Frances Stevenson from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and Andrew Crummy MBE, the artist behind the Great Tapestry of Scotland.

Leonie Bell, Director V&A Dundee, said: “V&A Dundee is designed for everyone, a place full of activity and energy, always changing through a dynamic design programme and from the ways visitors and communities make it their own.

“These three upcoming exhibitions celebrate the infinite ways that design shapes our lives and our environments. From the Dundee Tapestry’s stitched love story to the city, to A Fragile Correspondence's exploration of three Scottish landscapes that looks at new ways to think about architecture and land, through to the history of modern garden design.

“Garden Futures is an exhibition that unearths our deep relationship to, and delight, from gardening and gardens as places of creativity, of production and labour, of pleasure, solitude and community, as well as being places full of promise and hope for the future.”

She added: “Next year’s major new exhibition, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature explores the design history of the garden and imagines how gardens and gardeners can help us imagine and create a greener future. Later this year, A Fragile Correspondence will show at V&A Dundee following its debut last year at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale.

“We’re absolutely delighted that the Dundee Tapestry will return in November, bringing a new opportunity to celebrate the work of the 140-strong community of stitchers who created each of the 35 beautifully made panels. Stitch by stitch, the Dundee Tapestry tells the stories of the people, places and moments that made and changed Dundee, and brings so much joy to all those who see it.”