The unveiling of a prestigious English Heritage Blue Plaque in the summer of 2022 to commemorate Fanny Rollo Wilkinson (1855-1951) at her central London address, finally threw a spotlight on one of Britain’s earliest pioneers of women’s horticultural education. Wilkinson’s career, as the first female landscape garden designer for, among others, the Metropolitan Public Gardens, Boulevard and Playground Association and the Kyrle Society, and later as head of Swanley Horticultural College, is rightly recognized as helping other women smash the glasshouse ceiling that had previously prevented them from being employed in the gardening world. This talk will look not only at Wilkinson’s life but also at the stories of many of the students she taught and encouraged in the early twentieth century during her time at Swanley as well as the first women to be accepted at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Gardens Trust wraps up its third series on The 19th Century Garden with this lecture by the excellent Catherine Horwood on October 20. The Zoom lecture will be available to view at your leisure for one week following the live presentation. £5 Register at Eventbrite HERE.
Dr Catherine Horwood is a social historian with a passion for plants. She is an experienced speaker and has published widely including for Gardens Illustrated, The English Garden and the Daily Telegraph. Her biography, Beth Chatto. A life with plants (Pimpernel Press, 2019), was selected as the European Garden Book of the Year in 2020. Other books include Rose (Reaktion, 2018) and Potted History. How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (Pimpernel Press, 2020). Catherine is also the author of Gardening Women. Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010), described by The Sunday Times as ‘beautifully constructed and cogently written…Neither gardens nor women will seem quite the same again’.
