Daily Archives: March 9, 2023

Thursday, March 16, 10:00 am GMT (but recorded) – C20 Garden Part 2 – Margery Fish and the Cottage Garden Movement, Online

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Created and re-created against the backdrop of cycle of war and peace with its accompanying social and economic impacts, the twentieth century garden pivots between tradition and modernism, informality and structure. The century sees a shift in both style and materials as concrete takes its place at the heart of new towns and spaces, whilst the country house garden struggles to survive and flourish again in a new order. Garden design increasingly reflects the needs of a wider range of society, whilst literary and artistic movements locate gardens at the very heart of the struggle for meaning in a world of change and aspiration. The Gardens Trust series reflects the continuity and change in garden design and understanding through the twentieth century highlighting specific gardens and designers and setting them within more contextual discussions. 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. Tickets £30 or £5 each. To purchase a ticket for the complete series through Eventbrite, visit HERE. The Gardens Trust has complete details on its website.

The March 16 talk with the excellent Catherine Horwood centers on Margery Fish. My personal favorite instructional quote from one of Ms. Fish’s books is “First, have your man dig a ditch.” I didn’t have the man to do such a thing, and it was an artifact of an age.

For many years, Margery Fish fought a lonely battle to revive the popularity of the cottage garden style of planting in an age of close-mown striped lawns and beds of formal floribunda and Hybrid Tea roses. But was cottage garden planting ever a true horticultural style or rather a romantic, bucolic myth? In this talk, Dr Catherine Horwood will look at what constitutes this type of planting, where it originated from and how it links to other gardening styles. She will consider how Margery Fish was able to take it forward into becoming a national movement through her life story, and the legacy she left behind.

Dr Catherine Horwood is an experienced speaker and the author of many books on social history including Gardening Women. Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010) and Potted History. How houseplants took over our homes (Pimpernel Press, 2020). Her biography Beth Chatto. A Life with Plants (Pimpernel Press, 2019) was selected as the European Garden Book of the Year in 2020. She is currently working on a biography of Lady Dorothy Nevill.

Monday, March 13, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Plant Hunting and Plant Transfers: Economic Botany and Plant Exchange, Online

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The stories of the individual plant hunters who operated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century have often been told and told well. The aim of this online Gardens Trust series of lectures with Dr. Toby Musgrave, therefore, is to broaden the subject and to explore four complementary yet contrasting topics. It will also serve as an introduction to the whole topic of plant hunting, collecting and transfer round the world, which we are planning to cover in more depth in the autumn. The secon lecture on March 13 is Economic Botany and Plant Exchange. The series ticket costs £16 for the course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. To register through Eventbrite, and for more information, visit HERE, or visit The Gardens Trust events page, https://thegardenstrust.org/events-archive/?events=gardenstrust. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

It is well known that Sir Joseph Banks in his role as unofficial Director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew established a paradigm for botanical plant hunting on a global scale. This lecture offers a different economic perspective and examines plants as a vehicle for colonial expansion and exploitation; and it will bring the topic up to date with a discussion of contemporary issues including as genetic copyright and cultural and intellectual property.