Royal College Of Art

The aim of our scheme was to metamorphose a dreary, dark and awkward internal court in the RCA into something green and memorable – to create a forest of ferns. Formed in the 1960s when the then new and very stylish buildings were thrown up, it is placed at the heart of the college and its artistic community. The new garden is intended to conjure images of primaeval England when she was, as Charles Dickens remarked in 1860, but a ‘steaming morass, covered with the rank tropical vegetation of the tree-fern groves’.

The artist Esther Teichmann captured the fernery or, as she calls it, “this otherworldly oasis” in her photographic artwork. In the FT Photo London Series 2023 featuring the artist, she recollects often looking down on it, finding inspiration both in its homeliness and magical possibility.

Teichmann, E. (2023), ‘Looking at London through the eyes of three contemporary photographers’, FT Photo London Series 2023, 4 May (Accessed 16 May 2023).

Fourth image courtesy of © Esther Teichmann/Flowers Gallery