Through an exploration of drama, diaries, novels and magazines, this Gardens Trust Wednesday five part series will examine how writers have used gardens and plants to evoke memories, capture ideas of taste and fashion, satirize attitudes, champion social change and give deeper meaning to the world. The chosen authors cover almost four centuries of literature and, through examining their words, we can gain new understandings of the roles, meanings and emotive power of historic landscapes and horticulture. This ticket link https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gardens-and-the-written-word-tickets-930348275737 is for the entire series of 5 talks, or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links on that page. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25). All purchases are handled through Eventbrite.

Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 1 week afterwards. Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk. 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 weeks.

Week Two of the series, on October 9, is Gardens and the Written Word: Travel Writing and Garden Visiting with Louise Crawley. The pastime of domestic travel for pleasure which swept through England’s ‘polite’ society in the long eighteenth century (c.1700 – c.1820) left a remarkable legacy of ‘amateur’ travel writing. Domestic tourists left detailed accounts of their thoughts and perceptions on country houses and designed landscapes, wider landscape scenes, and towns and cities, as they sought in-person experiences through which to demonstrate their grasp of taste and culture. This talk will explore the phenomenon of garden visiting and landscape appreciation as documented in the travel writing produced by tourists of the period. It will consider the experiences of travelers, how they perceived and interacted with landscapes and recorded their thoughts. It will also consider the concept of a specific descriptive ‘language’ of landscape, shared and understood by ‘polite’ people, and the value of travel writing for our understandings of historic gardens and landscapes today.

Louise Crawley is a postgraduate researcher in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia, specializing in eighteenth-century travel writing accounts of the British landscape. Recently, Louise has worked as landscape advisor and historian for English Heritage, and as a freelance consultant specializing in landscape conservation and restoration plans. This talk is based on research undertaken as part of her doctoral thesis examining the concept of a wider codified vocabulary of descriptive terms used to describe specific landscape forms and to communicate ‘taste’ in the eighteenth century. The image below shows the fictional Doctor Syntax sketching a lake in his tour diary, a satirical swipe at travellers created by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson (1813).