Ask most people to describe the greatest days of British garden history and they’ll probably end up talking about the grand gardens of Edwardian England where lots of staff worked on maintaining huge flower borders, vast kitchen gardens and seemingly endless shrubberies. In other words the sort of garden that has been labelled the Golden Age of gardening in Britain. Is that a realistic view? By the late C19th Britain had moved from being a rural to an urban nation. Cities expanded but nostalgia for the countryside was widespread, while new suburbs developed a culture of their own. Technology and mechanization continued to change life, usually but not always for the better, but there were also constant calls to return to traditional methods, which were reflected in gardens. While nurseries filled our gardens with huge numbers of new plants from round the world, at the same time there was greater interest in wild flowers and natural planting. This affected garden styles and designs, and everything became possible – from imitation exotic Japanese gardens to reimagined “Tudorbethan” parterres and blowsy labor-intensive herbaceous borders. At the same time interest in horticulture spread right across the social scale as seed companies enabled anyone with a little space and a few spare pennies to take up gardening for themselves.
So while it’s true that in many ways this truly was a Golden Age it’s also true that it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.
This ticket is for the entire course of 6 sessions. or you may purchase a ticket for upcoming individual sessions, costing £5 via the links found at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-c19th-garden-part-4-tickets-445595426917 Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.
On November 3, the first talk in the series will look those artists who created the impression that the period leading up to the Great War was the Golden Age of British gardening. As we have seen in previous lectures gardens were never a major subject for artists until the mid-C19th but then they takes center stage. This is partly because of a growing interest in gardening and partly because art was now becoming more commercialized. Many garden artists worked in watercolor, a much more affordable medium for the growing number of middle class collectors. There were more artists societies, more commercial galleries and exhibitions of living artists work and more opportunities for their work to be used in colour in books, magazines and prints.
In the last series we saw the work of artists like Myles Birkett Foster and Frederic Walker who painted prettified and idealized versions of the gardens of the rural poor, but from the 1880s onwards they were joined on the gallery wall by those of artists like George Elgood and Arthur Rowe who preferred the gardens of the rural rich whose country house estates combined nostalgia for old-fashioned gardens with historical revivalism in architecture. Their paintings were romantic in style, lush and soft in colour and light and its gardens of the Golden Age are their creation
After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, Dr David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account. He was awarded a PhD in 2005 and now lectures about garden history anywhere that will listen to him. Recently appointed an honorary Senior Research Fellow by the University of Buckingham, he is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and chairs their Education Committee. He oversees their on-line programme and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at https://thegardenstrust.blog
