Flowers for Isabella

Join us this summer to dig into the roots of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s passion for plants. Both an avid gardener and a trailblazing curator, Isabella relished in her “deliriously glorious” garden at Green Hill—her estate in Brookline, Massachusetts—before she constructed her Museum. A site of respite and a testing ground for innovation, it was there that Isabella first cultivated the varieties that would fill the Museum Courtyard, honed her curatorial vision, and furthered her conviction that art and nature enliven one another. Isabella’s horticultural creativity is captured on the canvases of paintings on view throughout the Gardner Museum today.

Flowers for Isabella, on view from June 26 – September 21, 2025 in the Fenway Gallery, gathers archival materials and artworks from the Gardner collection depicting four of Isabella’s most cherished species—irises, peonies, chrysanthemums, and nasturtiums. Together they create a new portrait of the Museum’s founder just steps away from her ever-blooming Courtyard garden. 

Denman Waldo Ross (American, 1853 – 1935), Peonies, about 1919. Oil on canvas board, 36 x 26 cm (14 3/16 x 10 1/4 in.). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

At the very heart of the Gardner Museum is a garden. Filled with plants from disparate climates that thrive in disparate seasons, the Courtyard embodies Isabella Stewart Gardner’s unique approach to curation and brings the outside world in. But this urban oasis is missing a marker of the natural world: the songs of the creatures that should dwell within it. This summer, artist Lee Mingwei further blurs the boundaries of artifice and nature by introducing a subtle soundscape to the Courtyard, filling it with the melodies of crickets, cicadas, and frogs—all produced by a human voice.

Small Conversation invites visitors to deepen their engagement with the Courtyard of the Gardner Museum and the summer exhibitions’ examination of gardens as human-made “natural” spaces—and to wonder at our changing environments and climates when silence returns. 

Flowers for Isabella is supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Amy and David Abrams, the Barr Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, Wagner Foundation, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson,  Yuchun and Agustina Lee, and by an endowment grant from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.