In this entertaining Gardens Trust online talk on May 29, Dr. Peter Robinson tests the compatibility of two popular, but much bowdlerized sayings: that the English are a ‘nation of gardeners’, and of ‘dog lovers’. Drawing on historical materials taken from the gardening press, the talk examines the different roles that dogs have played in English gardens through time. Whether to provide security, act as pest controllers, or as family companions, dogs are an integral part of the garden story. They have been rendered in stone, as in the famous Jennings Dog, and celebrated intimately by their owners, who have incorporated them into their garden designs. Christopher Lloyd’s dachshunds, Dahlia and Canna, live on in a pebble mosaic, and who could forget the nation’s favorite golden retriever, Monty Don’s Nigel, now remembered fondly in box topiary. But celebrated as they are today, dogs and gardens have not always been viewed as complementary. With a proclivity for ad hoc excavation, penchant for chasing animals, not to mention for making certain natural deposits which offended Edwardian sensibilities, dogs have at times been cast as enemies of the garden, inducing a wide range of solutions from the comical to the downright cruel. This, then, is the untold story of the Canine Cultivator.
Peter Robinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Japan Women’s University. He has taught and lectured widely on landscape and garden history, most recently in 2023 for the Gardens Trust in a pair of lectures on the Japanese graphic designer and artist, Sugiura Hisui. Dr Robinson has also taught and written extensively on book history, literature, and the history of ideas at the University of Tokyo, Keio University, and Waseda University. In 2016, he co-conceived a Heritage Lottery-funded literary outreach project ‘A South Downs Alphabet’ (with June Goodfield), involving local schools and the U3A. Following this, in 2017, he was sole-curator of a large exhibition at the University of Tokyo’s Komaba Museum, ‘Novelists and Newspapers: The Golden Age of Newspaper Fiction, 1900-1939’.
Dr Robinson is currently working on a gardening book for the general reader, which follows the establishment of a private garden, 800 meters above sea level on the side of an active volcano, deep within the Hakone-Izu National Park.
Ticket price £8, Gardens Trust members £6 Sign up through Eventbrite HERE You will receive a Zoom link and a recording will be available following the lecture for one week.
