Daily Archives: November 25, 2022

Thursday, December 8, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm – The Folly & The Ivy, Online

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Caroline Holmes takes us on an entertaining tour of garden follies with intellectual gymnastics, jaw dropping extravagance or private vision. Cryptic, fantastical, allegorical, innovative, romantic and modernist from the Renaissance to Charles Hamilton’s Painshill, into Bomarzo’s ‘Sacro Bosco’, an ocean of shell grottoes and finally a ‘blotto grotto’ in Herefordshire. The program is on December 8 beginning at 11, and is sponsored by the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust. £5.00. Register HERE.


Caroline Holmes is a lecturer, broadcaster, author and consultant designer. She is Academic Tutor for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and also lectures for various organizations internationally, and on tours sponsored by the US Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in France. In 2019 she was keynote speaker at the International Water Lily Symposium at Giverny based on the research for her last book Water Lilies and and Bory Latour-Marliac – the genius behind Monet’s Water Lilies. She is the author of 12 books, here latest being Where the wildness pleases – the English Garden Celebrated. Her RHS Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener was finalist in the 2014 Garden Media Guild Reference Book of the Year Award. Design consultancies include Tudor-inspired gardens for a Humanist Renaissance ‘journey’ around Notre Dame de Calais, 16th-18th-century orchards and gardens with modern operatic borders at High House for the Royal Opera House, and the poisons planting in The Alnwick Garden. Caroline co-presented Glorious Gardens on Anglia TV and has presented several series for BBC Radio 4. She received the Gertrude B Foster Award for Excellence in Herbal Literature in 2011 and the Elizabeth Crisp Rea Award in 2017 from the Herb Society of America. Her own house and garden have been featured in Country Homes and Interiors, Country Life, Country Living, Garden News and The English Garden and filmed for BBC and Anglia TV. www.horti-history.com

Thursday, December 1 – The 19th Century Garden: Nurseries and Seedsmen, Online

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Much of the driving force behind the development of gardens during the Victorian period was due to the success and enterprise of Britain’s nurseries and seedsmen. They led the way in scouring the globe for new plants for British gardens and greenhouses, introducing them in to commercial production and encouraging the spread. of gardening through cheap and reliable seeds. Companies like Carters, Suttons and Veitches transformed British horticulture in just a few generations, becoming internationally important businesses. But they were not alone. There were dozens of others, smaller in scale, but no less important in impact, taking advantage of improved rail networks, cheap postage and printing, as well as increased leisure time. This Gardens Trust online talk on December 1 will tell their story, primarily through the example of Carters Seeds, which was the largest in Britain and later one of the largest in the world. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5 – Register through Eventbrite 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.

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 program and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at https://thegardenstrust.blog