The Evolution Garden

Professor Alice Roberts, the anatomist, biological anthropologist, author and broadcaster, and acclaimed international garden designer Professor David Stevens are creating the headline Show Garden at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2026.

Alice will host live, daily conversations from the garden. Experts from Hillier, plant suppliers for the garden, will be sharing advice about the plants featured.

The Evolution Garden was conceived by Alice Roberts and designed by David Stevens, and traces the evolution of plants and animal life forms from their first appearance on our planet.

Visitors will be able to walk through a living landscape that starts with views of dramatic rocks, scree and cascading water of the Cambrian age of some 450 million years ago. They will pass swamps from the Devonian and Carboniferous, planted with mosses, horsetails and ferns before entering the Carboniferous era, where plant life diversifies, and giant dragonflies swoop overhead.

At the end of the Permian, many more plants evolved, including Cycads, Tree Ferns and Ginkgos, together with early dinosaurs, but this was to be short-lived with the great extinction that followed, with a blasted landscape and loss of millions of species.

With the coming of the Triassic and Jurassic, visitors are greeted with a regenerated world of forests and dinosaurs, a rich world that merges into the Cretaceous, where yet another devastating extinction occurred and eventually gave way to a world where we start to see the first flowering shrubs and trees that included giant Redwoods, followed by sweeping grasslands and the first Humanoids. Here we see the Hariotome Boy, where he fell bearing his axe at the edge of a lake, but it's not until a mere 13,000 years ago that we see our ancestors tending crops of Millet and Gourds.

As we leave the garden, we are fascinated by a model of the BIFoR project, one of the world's largest climate change research facilities. Here, circular arrays of pipes surround Oak trees, releasing elevated levels of carbon dioxide into the forest canopy. Samples are continuously analysed, which aids collaboration on climate change research into the future.