Rosemary Nicholson

Lorna Rosemary Nicholson (née Weeks; 3 July 1919 – 28 October 2004) was a British co-founder of the Museum of Garden History (now the Garden Museum) in London. She and her husband discovered the tomb of two men who had been Royal gardners, plant collectors and the founders of the first museum in England. Two years later she heard that the church where they were buried was to be demolished. They started a campaign that restored the church and transformed the site into the first museum of gardening which is located near the houses of parliament and the garden is free to visitors.

Life Nicholson was born on 3 July 1919 in Lancashire at Southport. Her parents were Louise Wilhelmina (born Black) and Robert Foster Jeffrey Weeks. They already had four children and she was their last. Her father had been in the military and he had been gassed. He became a mining engineer but he had not recovered so her family emigrated to South Africa when she was very young. The family lived in South Africa and then in India where her father died. She was successful in her application to attend the Slade School of Fine Art but her mother refused her permission because it was "not respectable".

In 1940 she married John Edward Nicholson who served in the Royal Navy in Glasgow – he was a few years older than her. After the war, John founded an engineering business in Cheltenham, and they had three children. In time they moved to London.

The first English museum that they had founded was long gone and their collection was in Oxford but their neglected tombs were a notable but forgotten piece of funerary art. They were inside what had been the Church of St Mary at Lambeth. The deconsecrated church's site dated from at least the reign of Edward the Confessor as it had been owned by his sister. The tower was built in about 1378. The church adjoined the London home of the archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace, but it had been deconsecrated in 1972.

In 1976 it was announced that the church was to be demolished.

Three years later the church had a roof and the graveyard had been cleared revealling that other botanically related graves included those of Elizabeth and William Bligh and James Sowerby. but the museum charges for entry.