This week, Gemma Anderson-Tempini’s All is Leaf went up in the Garden History Room at Tresco Abbey Gardens. A site-specific, contemporary art installation developed over a decade of visiting the gardens and inspired by its unique botanical collection, it brings together collage, etching, drawing, painting and photogrammetry to document some of the unique hybrid plants found only on Tresco.
It is accompanied by a digital companion on the Research Catalogue, and by a creative guide that leads visitors round the gardens to encounter the abbey’s unique hybrids for themselves.
As part of our Museum on the Move programme, 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, 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.
Gemma Anderson Tempini tells us about the background to this piece of work, and her feelings about the importance of this commission.
“My first visit to Tresco was in 2012, when I came as a drawing lecturer from Falmouth University to run workshops with students in the gardens. I was there to teach, but was so astounded by the range and strangeness of the plant forms that I could not help but draw at every opportunity. 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.”
Many 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.
Gemma tells us: “When the opportunity arose to apply for this commission, 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. We returned again during the project, working and camping with the children, which was an adventure in itself. This exhibition documents the first systematic record of those hybrids through photogrammetry models, observational drawings, etchings, and watercolours.
I find the language of native and alien, as it is applied to plants, worth questioning. It is divisive, and it does not reflect biological reality. What interests me, both here and in my wider practice, is the hybrid as a truer model of identity: for plants, and for people. We are all, in some sense, the product of mixture, of movement, of unexpected proximity. The Tresco hybrids make that visible in a particularly beautiful way, and it has been a privilege to attend to them.
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.
Gemma’s work on Tresco is part of the development of the new Cultural Centre and Museum on St Mary’s and has been made possible by the Foyle Foundation, National Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England and the new displays should be in place by Autumn 2026.
For more about Gemma’s work: www.gemma-anderson.co.uk