“Flowers from the Frontline”: Herbaria from the Frontline
The exhibition presents three herbaria, recreated as photographic images. These touching visual archives interweave personal memory, historical experience, and the quiet power of nature amid the moments of war.
The originals of all three herbaria are preserved at the Garden Museum in London – the UK’s only museum dedicated to the art, history, and design of gardens, under the patronage of the King Charles III himself.
George Marr’s Herbarium, 1917
These pressed flowers were collected by British soldier George Marr whilst serving on the Eastern Front in Greece during the First World War. Marr picked flowers along the trenches and posted from Salonika to his sweetheart, who later became his wife. Included in the collection is one of the first recorded poppies that later became symbolic of WW1.
Jane Lindsay’s Herbarium, 1957
A scrapbook of flowers used and created by a schoolgirl, Jane Lindsay, whilst she searched for botanicals in Blitz sites across the City of London. These flowers were collected from the bombsites, where the Barbican would later be built, and which she remembers as ‘a wild, open space, full of birds and wild flowers… and remnants of the old Roman walls’.
Olga Morozova’s Herbarium, 2022
The flowers in this herbarium were collected by Kyiv-based artist Olga Morozova in a park on the grounds of the city’s Left Bank in March 2022, as Kyiv came under fire and the once peaceful landscape began to transform into a line of defense.
The flowers gathered by the artist became the third herbarium from the frontline preserved at the Garden Museum in London. They served as the foundation for Phoebe Walsh’s jewellery collection and later inspired the large-scale exhibition project Flowers from the Frontline.
Garden Museum (London, UK)
Housed in the former Church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, the museum is a unique space dedicated to exploring the art of gardening and humanity’s relationship with nature. Its collection includes tools, botanical artifacts, paintings, and herbaria collected over centuries. The study of these preserved herbaria inspired curator and artist Phoebe Walsh to create her own jewellery series and the exhibition Flowers from the Frontline. She drew on the museum’s herbarium archives and explored 17th-century botanical books on medicinal plants, which became the foundation for her sketches and the intricate craftsmanship of the collection.
These three herbaria offer three perspectives on war through the lens of nature, beauty, and human vulnerability. They speak not only of loss, but of the enduring ability to preserve light in times of darkness.

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