What Would the Queen Think? The New London Garden Named After the Late Queen Elizabeth II

New london garden. A brief context to set expectations.

New london garden: Quick notes

A fascinating new garden in the midst of London’s most pampered park (created by royal tastemaker, the Prince Regent, in the 1810s) has been dedicated to his descendent, Queen Elizabeth II. Built on a 2-acre site of disused glasshouses in the Regent’s Park, the mainly xeric planting plan was designed by Noel Kingsbury to thrive in a substrate of ground concrete mixed with intractable London clay. It looks unusual, and within the range of eight parks across London known as the Royal Parks, it is unique. The opening coincided with what would have been Queen Elizabeth II’s 100th birthday, and some of her favorite plants have been included in the scheme, including magnolia and lily-of-the-valley. But there is little resemblance to, say, the formal gardens around Buckingham Palace or even Avenue Gardens in the Regent’s Park, extravaganzas of bedding in the grand tradition. This garden symbolizes something else about the UK’s longest-reigning queen.

We went along to find out what that might be.

Photography by Clive Nichols, except where noted.

Above: The new garden was built on a post-industrial site; before being decommissioned in 2018 when plant production moved to Hyde Park, this was the home of two acres of glasshouses.

The Queen Elizabeth II Garden is about longevity and resilience. Traced with meandering paths, intersected by a wide and straight “cut-through,” the hardscaping is beautiful and the planting is complex. It is a collaboration between the Royals Parks (and its head of horticulture, wunderkind Matt Pottage), the ecological plant designer Noel Kingsbury and HTA Design. It is a park garden that has been created from a post-industrial site and the result is not the kind of landscape that the Queen would have recognized in a British park. However, she no doubt would have appreciated that it is forward-looking, promising a huge net gain in biodiversity, while it is at the same time backward-glancing, in toasting her legacy.

Above: The QE2 garden has many spring bulbs, for crowd-pleasing color and also early pollen. Species tulips are favored over cultivars, since they come back year on year and work well in a naturalistic landscape.

It is no secret that the late queen was more passionate about dogs and horses than gardens, but her love of the countryside and nature was clearly on show. The only true gardening queens have been those who married into the royal family; the German ladies who created gardens around Kew Palace (later Kew Gardens), and the Queen Mother, who passed on the torch to her grandson, Charles.

Above: Species tulips can be showy too; Tulipa clusiana with Narcissus poeticus in the grassy meadow.

Matt Pottage, who is the Royal Parks’ very first Head of Horticulture (a role created only a couple of years ago), jumped straight into this project, which had already been approved in principle by the queen during her Platinum Jubilee year. “This isn’t maybe what you’d expect in a public park, maybe not the style of gardening you were brought up or trained to do,” he explained, when the park opened to the press (it opened to the public last week). “I think most of us were trained to get rid of rubbish and undesirable materials, bring in good clean top soil, and then feed and water everything so it reaches enormous proportions. We’ve gone against that here; we’ve kept all the demolition material in the garden, and on the back of that, we’ve created quite an unusual growing environment.”

We reference New london garden briefly to keep the thread coherent.

Above: More species tulips, Tulipa sylvestris (yellow) and T. greigii (red), in a chic substrate that is in fact recycled concrete from the glassshouses mixed with sticky London clay. In the background, an elegant terrazzo path is made from old gravel, rolled and polished into a smooth surface.