Tuesday, January 25, 10:00 am GMT – Forgotten Women Gardeners: Petticoats and Plants, the Untold Story of Scotland’s Gardening Women 1800 – 1930, Online
Celebrate Burns Night with this Gardens Trust lecture on January 25. £5, and you may register HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
The phenomenal success of Scotland’s gardening men has been well documented throughout history, but what of the women? Until now, there have been only glimpses of the extraordinary women who went ‘beyond their garden gates’ – women who cultivated, collected and made substantial contributions to horticulture within Britain. In this lecture, biographies of a selection of Scottish gardening women ranging from plant hunters to landscape architects reveal how they were effectively marginalized and why their work has largely been forgotten within the narrative of Scotland’s garden history.
Dr Deborah Reid promoted London’s Historic Royal Palaces and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre before swapping a career in Marketing and PR for plants. Having retrained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, she was awarded a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2015 for her thesis entitled ‘Unsung heroines of horticulture: Scottish gardening women, 1800 to 1930’ and has published widely on the subject, including the forthcoming work: Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in 19th Century Canada, edited by Ann Shteir (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where she lectures on the social history of gardening and mentors apprentice gardeners working within historic gardens at English Heritage properties. She is also a working gardener and serves as a trustee for Jock Tamson’s Gairden, a community garden in the heart of Edinburgh.
