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BRITISH FLOWERS WEEK


       

EXPERIMENTS IN PLANT HYBRIDISATION


By recognising the potential held within every part of a plant, this installation imagines a laboratory for plant hybridisation. Felled logs collected from parks and farms around London were assembled into functional forms under the valuable guidance of the Greenwood Guild, glass vessels were hand-sculpted over recent months, and plant materials were grown locally by friends and flower farmers.

THE GARDEN MUSEUM, LONDON
(June, 2026)

Taken directly from a paper first presented by Gregor Mendel in 1865, the exhibition title draws on Cedric Morris’ practice of hybridising plants within his garden. Mendel’s research into seven pairs of traits in the pea plant (flower colour, flower position, plant height, seed texture, seed colour, pea pod texture and pea pod colour) established some of the foundational principles of genetic inheritance. At the time, Mendel’s work received little attention as it was prior to the discovery of DNA.

What Mendel described as the pea hybrid might be more accurately understood as a cultivar rather than a hybrid. In botanical nomenclature, a cultivar (“cultivated variety”) has been selectively bred by humans for particular traits, such as colour patterning or flavour. As Mallet (2005) explains, hybridisation is often regarded as “unnatural or extremely rare” and linked to environmental degradation, indicative of a failure in the “balance of nature”. Yet despite the frequency of natural hybridisation in the wild and its role in generating plant biodiversity, species are still often understood as discrete, fundamental units rather than points along a continuous hierarchy of biodiversity. 

This installation reflects on the concept of the plant hybrid and magnifies the plant structures responsible for hybridisation, taking inspiration from the Miniature Ikebana assignment developed by Kasumi Teshigahara, second Iemoto of the Sogetsu School (1932-1980):

“Decide the containers, then the plant materials. Observe carefully the different parts of them including petals, pistils and stamens, fruits, leaves, branches and stems, to make new discoveries of their distinctive appearance which were not noticed before. [...] In this subject, you can have an experience of searching out or making containers, and reaffirming the importance of close observation of plants. Make the best use of this opportunity of creating a tiny original world or microcosm.”
Reference:

Mallet, J. (2005) Hybridization as an invasion of the genome. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20(5), pp.229–237.

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