Daily Archives: December 3, 2023

Thursday, December 7, 2:00 pm Eastern – Sissinghurst Through the Seasons, Winter Episode, Online

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Troy Scott Smith will guide you through the Garden Conservancy online course of a gardening year at Sissinghurst. Troy will share with you how the garden looks, which flowers are blooming at each season, and what the garden looked like when it was first created in the 1930s. He will uncover the secrets of pruning and propagation and the art of the English Garden. Each episode will be packed with information, all simply explained and illustrated, giving you techniques and confidence to put into practice in your own garden. The Winter episode will take place Thursday, December 7 at 2 pm Eastern. The bare blanket of earth that for many is the “winter garden,” need not be. If harnessed, the potency of the season can be as exhilarating as the heady explosion of summer. Pockets of evergreen planting, almost unnoticed in summer, are now an essential ingredient, exuding a presence and injecting solidity into the sparseness of the scene. Coatings of hoarfrost re-order the prominence of their outlines. Spring plants eager to steal a march on their competitor’s race to flower. There is nothing that disappoints about the winter garden, and in this final episode, Troy will share with you some of the possibilities to make winter in the garden a season to look forward to and enjoy.

Sissinghurst was created nearly a century ago by the writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson as a private home and as refuge dedicated to natural beauty. Today it is owned by the National Trust and visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Troy’s career has been devoted to the beauty and romance of gardening. Since joining the National Trust of England, Wales & Northern Ireland in 1990, Troy has led some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, among them the Courts (Wiltshire), Bodnant (Wales), and two stints at Sissinghurst (Kent), where he has led a remarkable transformation and restoration of the Vita Sackville-West gardens.

$5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

Wednesday, December 13, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – The Ornamental Wilderness in the English Garden, Online

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While today we may think of a wilderness as a wild place unspoiled by human intervention, in the 17th and 18th centuries a garden wilderness referred to a highly cultivated part of the formal garden, a place bounded by trees or tall hedges with paths to walk on and with occasional cultural delights within—statues or fountains or a summer house in the classical style. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted most of the garden and the setting in which all other features were placed. The wilderness was shady and private, a place for solitary retreat as well as social activity, an ‘artinatural’ space in which artifice and culture combined with nature. This illustrated online talk with The Gardens Trust on December 13 examines the history and development of the English garden wilderness and takes a new look at this period of garden history through the perspective of the wilderness garden.

James Bartos is the author of The Ornamental Wilderness in the English Garden (Unicorn, 2022) and has published in the journals Garden History and Die Gartenkunst. From 2015 to 2020 he was the first Chairman of the Gardens Trust, having previously served on the Council of the Garden History Society. He was awarded a PhD in Garden History from Bristol University in 2014. Over the past twenty-five years, he has created a new garden in Dorset.

The talk will be introduced by Peter Hughes KC, the chair of the Gardens Trust.

A recording of the talk will be available to ticket holders to enjoy throughout the Christmas period.

Ticket price £5, Gardens Trust members may use their promo code for an additional 10% discount.

Optional Ticket price £10 to include £5 donation to help us fund our work protecting historic green spaces. To register visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-ornamental-wilderness-in-the-english-garden-tickets-748729880227

Ticket sales close 4 hours before the event. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact The Gardens Trust), and a link to the recorded session, available until the end of December, will be sent shortly afterwards.