A small museum where all the exhibits are for sale.
Antiques, natural history, rare gifts, plants, fragrances and beautiful absurdities — every piece chosen by hand, and every piece available to take home.
A rotating collection of beauty and absurdity: antiques, specimens, stationery, fragrance and botanicals, each sourced by hand.
SN·001AvailableView exhibit →Ornithoptera spp.
A framed group of iridescent birdwings. The colour is structural, not pigment — it slides and flares as you cross the room. An antique, ethically sourced mount.
SN·002AvailableView exhibit →Morpho menelaus
A single Blue Morpho lit beneath a glass dome. There is no blue pigment in the wing at all; the colour is light bent by the scales themselves.
SN·003AvailableView exhibit →Echinoidea
Bleached urchin tests in a dozen sizes, sold singly or as a shoal. Each is a small piece of architecture — a five-fold dome built without one straight line. Priced from.
SN·004AvailableView exhibit →Asteroceras sp.
Sliced and polished to reveal the chambered spiral within — a piece of deep time that sits comfortably in one hand.
SN·005AvailableView exhibit →Attacus atlas
One of the largest moths on earth, framed under glass. Each wingtip mimics a snake's head — a quiet piece of theatre.
SN·006AvailableView exhibit →Vitrum pharmaceuticum
Labelled chemist's bottles gathered beneath a tall cloche — faded hand-inked labels and ground-glass stoppers, the lot.
SN·007ReservedView exhibit →after the Antique
A tray of plaster intaglio seals, miniature reliefs after antique gems — the sort a nineteenth-century traveller carried home from Rome.
SN·008AvailableView exhibit →Instrumenta
Turned-handle gravers and awls, worn smooth by use. Beautiful on a desk whether or not you ever cut a line.
SN·009AvailableView exhibit →objets de dévotion
Small wax-red devotional figures, massed together to unsettling and rather wonderful effect. The tasteful-absurdity end of the shop. Priced each.
SN·010AvailableView exhibit →Echinoidea, mounted
A dark-backed case of urchins and shells, arranged like a museum drawer and ready to hang as a single composition.
SN·011AvailableView exhibit →Buprestidae
A single metallic-green jewel beetle set on a leaf of antique text. Small, and quietly astonishing.
SN·012ArchiveView exhibit →Psittacus erithacus
A characterful antique mount. Birds like this pass through the shop rarely — tell us what you are after and Richard will watch for one.
SN·013SoldView exhibit →Phalacrocorax aristotelis
A long-necked seabird in fine antique condition. This one has found a home; comparable birds can be sourced for collectors.
SN·014ArchiveView exhibit →Erithacus rubecula
A pair of robins on a mossed branch under glass — the small, sentimental Victorian piece that anchors a shelf.
SN·015ArchiveView exhibit →Oology, antique
A glazed cabinet of blown eggs from an old collection, held as a study piece. Historic collections of this kind can be sourced to order.
SN·016ArchiveView exhibit →Buceros sp.
A casqued hornbill skull, sculptural and strange. A one-off; similar osteology sourced to order.
SN·017ArchiveView exhibit →Gavialis gangeticus
A long, tooth-studded gharial jaw — pure natural-history drama. Antique, and sourced to order.
SN·018ArchiveView exhibit →Lodoicea maldivica
The legendary double coconut: the largest seed in the plant kingdom and, for centuries, the most rumoured. CITES-permitted examples sourced for serious collectors.
Second Nature opened in Highgate in 2004 and moved to 79 Fortis Green Road, Muswell Hill, in 2006. What began as a shop for garden antiques and rare plants has grown into something stranger and finer — a small museum of the beautiful and the absurd, with a natural-history thread running through it all.
It is curated by Richard Parker, who studied design at Camberwell and has worked across ceramics, book illustration, award-winning gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, and displays for Liberty, Selfridges and Bergdorf Goodman. Every object on these shelves has been chosen, not ordered from a catalogue — and a good deal of what passes through is sourced privately, for collectors who know roughly what they are missing.
Beyond the shop floor, Richard sources the unusual for private clients — collectors, decorators, and people furnishing a single perfect corner. Taxidermy in fine antique condition, fossils and shells, cabinets, osteology, natural-history oddities: if it can be found, it can usually be found for you.
Describe the piece, the spirit of it, or simply the gap on your shelf. There is no obligation, and the hunt is half the pleasure.
Drawn live from the shop’s Google listing.
79 Fortis Green Road,
Muswell Hill, London N10 3HP
Telephone 020 8444 1717
Please call before travelling if you are making a special journey — the shop may be closed while Richard is away sourcing stock.
View on Google Maps ↗| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | Closed |
| Wednesday | 11am – 4pm |
| Thursday | 9am – 6pm |
| Friday | 9am – 6pm |
| Saturday | 9am – 6pm |
| Sunday | 11am – 4pm |