Daily Archives: January 22, 2025


Tuesday, January 28, 5:00 am – 6:30 am (but recorded) – High Victorian Design

The High Victorian Period saw a rejection of the aesthetic rules that had shaped the English Landscape Garden. No more appeals to the picturesque. Goodbye to the line of beauty. In their place came a brilliant, gaudy, do-what-you-like swagger of color and historic revivalism; occasionally successful, often searingly bad, but always interesting and now sadly overlooked.
This talk will bring back some eccentric masterpieces of the age and follow their development from origins in Loudon’s gardenesque, to an eventual death under the crushing boot of good-taste and the Natural Garden. The Gardens Trust will present a lecture on January 28 online. This ticket is for this January 28 individual talk and costs £8 – Register HERE

Ben Dark is a writer, historian and ex-head gardener. He is author of The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 ½ Front Gardens (Mitchell Beasley, 2022) and is currently writing a history of plants for the Bodley Head. His articles appear widely and in 2022 he won the Garden Media Guild’s Journalist of the Year award.


Sunday, February 16, 2:00 pm – 28th Annual Winter Lecture: Jacqueline van der Kloet

Jacqueline van der Kloet will share bulb basics, color combinations, seasonal care for bulbs including naturalizing them to become independent, layering bulbs, growing bulbs on a larger scale, and integration for constant blooms in the garden for the Berkshire Botanical Garden Winter Lecture 2025 on Sunday, February 16, at 2 p.m. Join her on the journey through her favorite spring, summer, autumn, and winter flowering bulbs, and case studies of her naturalistic garden designs from around the world, including the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, the UK, and the Lurie Garden in the United States, where she collaborated with leading plantsman, Piet Oudolf.

Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden is a four-season guide to combining bulbs with perennials and grasses in a loose, carefree style, from a leading figure in the New Perennial movement. From the earliest snowdrops to alpine violets, tulips, alliums, late autumn crocuses, and many more, bulbs add interest and color to the garden throughout the year. Renowned naturalistic garden designer, Jacqueline van der Kloet, has mastered a casual, magical technique where bulbs emerge playfully among other plants, as if dancing freely among the perennials and grasses. Both friendly and accessible, van der Kloet will explore the recently published book; introducing bulbs as essential to any garden at any scale, inviting in pollinators, providing wonderful pops of color and personality, and extending a garden’s bloom time in the shoulder seasons.

Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden provides unique inspiration and expert insight gained from van der Kloet’s vast career, using nature as a model. Indeed, growing bulbs in van der Kloet‘s style makes the garden appear as if nature had planted the bulbs herself. 

Jacqueline van der Kloet is an internationally acclaimed garden designer and one of Holland’s best-known gardening authorities. She is a plant specialist whose advice is sought by designers and landscape architects. Her designs are prized for their beauty, naturalized schemes, bold uses of color. Van der Kloet’s client list includes some of the most prestigious public gardens in the world. In North America, she teamed with Piet Oudolf for innovative plantings at New York’s Battery Park, New York Botanical Garden, and Chicago’s Lurie Garden. Her work across Europe and Asia ranges from Holland’s famous Keukenhof, to the palace Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, Japan to the Newport Bay Club at Disneyland, Paris. Her work includes many private gardens and she frequently contributes to international exhibitions.

Also, please join us for a coffee and cookie reception after the lecture, to be held at the Lenox Middle High School in Lenox, Massachusetts. BBG members $40, nonmembers $55. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org