The Gardens Trust will focus on head gardeners working at historic sites. Split into two 5-week series on Wednesdays, the season will kick off with an exploration of the head gardener role over the past two centuries, followed by talks exploring how individual head gardeners are balancing the heritage of their site, the wishes of its owner(s) and their own interests and experience. We’ll hear about the role from both seasoned head gardeners and those more recently appointed. Join us to learn about the challenges they face, including climate change, as well as the joys of horticulture and heritage.
At the end of the first series, we will also be offering a FREE roundtable discussion on the different career paths available to head gardeners, and ways of encouraging more people to enter or progress in the profession. Please register separately for this.
You may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £20 via the link here. [Gardens Trust members may use their promo code for a discount.] Please register separately for the roundtable discussion, or for individual sessions by following the links HERE. Ticket sales close 4 hours before the talk. 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.
The first talk is titled: Real Virtues and Exasperating Foibles: The Fraught Relationship between Landowner and Head Gardener, 1823-2023. Drawing on personal experience as a head gardener as well as archive material and contemporary diaries, Ben Dark examines the often tense, occasionally combative and sometimes staggeringly productive relationship between an estate’s most unusual servant and their employer.
Starting in 1823, when Joseph Paxton met the 6th Duke of Devonshire, and ending in 2023 with the return of ‘the celebrity head gardener,’ this talk will examine how professional horticulturalists and wealthy landowners have responded to changing garden fashions, social structures and ways of life. It will end by drawing on two-centuries’ worth of conflict and collaboration to make a prediction about how gardeners and their employers will be getting on (or not) fifty years from now.
Ben Dark is a gardener and writer. After reading History at university he trained in horticulture, working his way up to head gardener level while completing an MA in Garden and Landscape history. In November he was named Journalist of the Year at the Garden Media Guild Awards and his book, The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 ½ Front Gardens (Mitchell Beasley, 2022) a mixture of garden history, biography and nature writing, has been widely praised in the gardening and general press.
