The Suffolk Gardens Trust is pleased to be offering a series of four talks to highlight some aspects of the county’s rich gardening heritage. It is offered as a companion to the newly-launched co-operative project on ‘Suffolk’s Unforgettable Garden Story’ by The Gardens Trust and the Suffolk Gardens Trust, with funding by Historic England. This seeks to encourage research into the historic parks and gardens, public parks, cemeteries and other good examples of designed landscapes of Suffolk, with the overarching aim of adding layers of protection to these green spaces and to promote their future survival.
This ticket (click HERE) is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 4 sessions at a cost of £16 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.
This final installment on November 23 is on Ickworth Park. Ickworth’s clayland park provides a fascinating setting for the architectural developments of the Hervey family from John, created Baron Hervey, then 1st Earl of Bristol, to the sad demise of the 7th Marquess in 1999. The Earl Bishop provides an eighteenth-century interlude that takes us across Europe, into Ireland and back to Bury St Edmunds, his architect wrote: ‘The Rotunda is a monument to the idea of Italy in the English mind’ but for his widow it was his stupendous monument to folly. The formal gardens were laid out in the early 1800’s to replicate the floor plan creating what is arguably the first Italianate garden in the UK, now a National Trust property.
Caroline Holmes is Academic Tutor and Course Director for the University of Cambridge ICE, lecturer for The Arts Society, and is the author of 12 books. Her consultancies include devising planting for The Poison Garden, Alnwick, Humanist Renaissance inspired gardens around Notre Dame-de-Calais and currently for a new development near Thetford, creating two areas to celebrate the Queen’s Green Canopy and other public spaces. She has presented Viking TV features and her garden was filmed in September. Academic but not dry she has spoken on every continent except Antarctica.
