There is a timelessness to the Walled Garden at Osborne House, where flowers bloom much as they did over a century ago, their petals whispering secrets of a royal past. In 2024, the garden erupted into an extraordinary display, with the peonies—vast billows of pink, ivory, and gold—flourishing under the perfect conditions of the season. It was a bloom to rival any in history, a spectacle that might have graced the very same paths when Queen Victoria reigned.
In the Gardens of the Queen captures this continuity, this living thread between past and present. Composed of layered photographs taken in Osborne’s gardens, the piece transforms the riot of peonies, climbing vines, and scattered wildflowers into a dreamscape—soft, ethereal, and richly textured. It is easy to imagine that these same varieties once grew within these walls, cultivated with care to provide beauty not just in the garden but within the grand rooms of Osborne House itself.
The Victorians valued their flowers not only for their beauty but for their symbolism and presence in daily life. The peonies, roses, and delicate sprigs of wildflowers that bloom today would once have been cut and arranged for the royal family and visiting dignitaries, their fragrance filling the halls, their petals softening the formality of state rooms and private chambers alike. Each bouquet was a reflection of the garden outside, carefully curated to complement the season and occasion.
Here, in this modern reimagining of the garden, the same floral splendor is preserved—not in vases or gilded salons, but in layers of photographic artistry. Twisting vines weave through the composition like tendrils of time itself, binding the present to the past. A delicate crab perches atop a cluster of blossoms, a fleeting visitor in a place where nature and history intertwine.
There is something almost ghostly in the way the flowers merge into one another, their edges soft, as if seen through a misted memory. It is as though the essence of all those past arrangements, those royal bouquets, still lingers here, among the blooms that continue to grow year after year. In the Gardens of the Queen does not just depict flowers—it preserves a tradition, a moment in time repeated endlessly through the turning of the seasons.
Though the royal footsteps that once graced these gardens have long since faded, the flowers remain. And whether they bloom in the garden or stand in elegant vases within Osborne House, they continue to do what they have always done—bringing beauty, life, and history into the present.
