Your backyard has a unique plant community based on the ecology and geology of the area.
In this three-part Native Plant Trust workshop to be held online, learn to identify appropriate native plants and groupings for your site and create a personalized plant palette and design that is beautiful and enhances biodiversity. Leave the workshop inspired to integrate science and art in your garden. Tickets: $135 Members – $162 Non-Members. Sessions will be held from 6-9 on September 10, 27m and October 4. Staci Jasin, Landscape Designer, will instruct.
On September 17 at 10 am, join George Schoellkopf as he tells the story of how he started the garden at Hollister House over forty years ago and how he has shaped its growth through the intervening years. Old photographs show the garden at every stage of its development, as new sections were added and the original garden was improved and reimagined. George will illustrate how conditions in the garden have changed over the years, and how newly available hybrids and plant species offered the opportunity to create exciting new horticultural scenarios.
George Schoellkopf was born in 1942 in Dallas, Texas, where he battled as a child against the harsh Texas climate to make his first garden. He was educated in Connecticut at The Hotchkiss School and at Yale University. He also holds a master’s degree in Art History from Columbia University in New York City, where for many years he ran a gallery specializing in 18th and 19th century American antiques and folk art and was thus only able to garden on weekends. He now divides his time between Hollister House and Santa Barbara, CA. George has written articles on gardening in Town & Country, House & Garden, House Beautiful, Fine Gardening and Rosemary Verey’s The American Man’s Garden. George is a member of the Board of Directors of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Lotusland in Santa Barbara California and an honorary member of the Washington, CT Garden Club.
Advance reservation is suggested. Hollister House will follow all state and local guidelines for Covid-19 at our events.
A 6-part Gardens Trust online lecture series, exploring how flowers and gardens have inspired textile artists, begins Mondays at 18:00 BST, equivalent to 2 pm Eastern time. Here in their latest series of talks they are taking a sideways view by exploring how gardens and flowers have influenced and inspired other arts and crafts. This first series of 6 will focus on textiles and explore some of the historical and technical aspects of embroidering, weaving and printing using floral designs on fabric. You will look at textiles from Elizabethan crowns to Edwardian table linen to see how flowers provided inspiration, taking in the prolific art embroiderers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Then you will be brought bang up to date with two contemporary embroiderers with very different approaches to floral imagery who will share their design processes with us.
The first talk on September 19 is The Broderer’s Crown, with Cynthia Jackson. Following the reformation, embroiderers in the Tudor era increasingly embraced the use of floral imagery to decorate a myriad of objects from ceremonial items to furnishings and fashionable garments. Luxury fabrics such as silk velvet and cloth woven with silver tinsel were embellished with botanical imagery gleaned from popular illustrated herbals. La Clef des Champs provided patterns inspired by Jacques Le Moyne’s exquisite watercolour representations of life in a Tudor garden. Skilled hands created beautiful embroideries using polychrome silks and gold and silver threads in a variety of techniques.
Three exceptional extant Tudor embroideries illustrate the remarkable creativity of the Tudor embroiderer. The textile known as the Bacton Altar Cloth is like a garden, a sampling of a wide range of colourful, botanical sprigs arranged in rows, alive with insects flitting through the blooms. In the early tradition of the popular miniature, a small and exquisitely embroidered portrait of a fashionable Tudor lady is featured in front of a formal garden, complete with topiary and fountain. The Broderer’s Crown is a ceremonial artifact used to inaugurate a newly elected official of the 16th century Livery Company. It is unique in its decoration of applied silk and metal flowers on a circlet of silk velvet. The overall design is a simple repeat but as the individual layers of flowers and fruit are explored, the embroidery on the Crown reveals an astonishing complexity.
This ticket (click HERE) is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Cynthia Jackson is a freelance embroiderer, designer and tutor. An award-winning textile artist, she finds inspiration in the remarkable potential of embroidery, experimenting with the unusual while preserving a commitment to technique. Cynthia’s focus, as an independent academic researcher, is on professional Tudor embroiderers and the impact of their craft on the material culture of early modern England. Her published articles combine documentary analysis with careful practical investigation of 16th century artifacts. She is a two-time recipient of the Society of Antiquaries of London’s Janet Arnold Award. Her current goal is to seek out, examine and re-create extant examples of 16th English embroidery, culminating in the publication of an illustrated history of Tudor embroidery and a practical guide to techniques and materials.
