Harpur Garden Images was an independent photographic library which held a collection of over 100,000 photographs of gardens and plants from the UK and abroad.

Garden at Gravetye Manor
Garden at Gravetye manor, by Marcus Harpur

Harpur Garden Images was founded in 1992 by Jerry Harpur and Marcus Harpur, building on Jerry's pioneering work in capturing gardens. The work carried on ever since with the same aims: to find excellence in gardens, planting and design and to capture it in the best light and atmosphere to show narrative and beauty.

Harpur Garden Images provided editorial content as well as imagery for countless other uses. The library held thousands of images from the UK and around the world, including stock images and whole feature sets. Content was updated frequently online, though many more images remained unpublished. For enquiries about the archive, please contact us.

Garden at Gravetye Manor
Garden at Gravetye manor, by Marcus Harpur

In loving Memory

Marcus Harpur, who died aged 52, was a photographer of rare craftsmanship, whose thoughtfully composed images of English gardens enlivened the pages of books and magazines.

Read more · Obituary

Jerry Harpur, who died aged 93, was a pioneering garden photographer whose gorgeous images, characterised by a masterful understanding of light and a fascination with garden design, featured in glossy magazines and more than 300 books.

Read more · Obituary

Jerry Harpur
Jerry Harpur

Places where the Harpurs' work, or work close to it, can be found.

  • RHS Lindley Collections — the Royal Horticultural Society's library and image archive. Holds a substantial photographic record of British gardens.
  • The Garden Museum, London — holds archives of several British garden photographers and designers.
  • The Gardener's Garden (Phaidon) — one of the large-format garden books in which Jerry Harpur's photography appeared.
  • Country Life and Gardens Illustrated— the two British magazines in which the Harpurs' work was most regularly published.

Notes from the archivist

On the desk at the moment.

  • On Photography — Susan Sontag. Read again every few years. Still useful.
  • The Ongoing Moment — Geoff Dyer. On how photographers keep returning to the same subjects.
  • The Well-Tempered Garden — Christopher Lloyd. The Great Dixter book; the gardens we spent the most time photographing.
  • Dust — Carolyn Steedman. On working in archives, and what archives are for.
  • Recent writing on generative image models and stock photography — the question of what an image library is for, when images can be made to order, is not going away.
  • Trevor Paglen's essays on machine vision and image datasets. Adjacent to the above, less resigned about it.