The fourth in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of The Gardener’s Magazine takes place May 13 at 1 pm Eastern.

It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’

In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.

Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realise how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.

Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. Registration for this session may be accessed through Eventbrite HERE. 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 until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.

J C Loudon ruled supreme in the nineteenth-century gardening press. Or did he? His publications changed garden writing forever by asking gardeners to share their views, advice and knowledge. To this he added his own wisdom, creating a persona of the benevolent ‘Conductor’. It gave him enormous influence and reach over the new middle-class gardening audiences and importantly was tolerated by landowners in a period of literary sedition and agitation. It all seemed too good to be true. Was gardening an opportunistic safe zone for writing and creating change? His recorded tours of gardens, nurseries and landscapes around the country opened the possibilities of what British gardens could become in the new age of Empire. However, there were others that sought his crown in the emerging garden-newspaper marketplace. They submitted opposing copy, plagiarized his works, gossiped about his wife and attempted to undermine him as they scurried around the streets of Covent Garden and Fleet Street, seeking to topple his authority. This talk will delve into the garden-writing warfare that surrounded Loudon’s legacy, seek out his rivals and ask whether Loudon truly was the authority of nineteenth-century gardening taste.

Francesca Murray’s recent PhD research focused on the role of the British gardener in nineteenth-century society and the philanthropic, self-help and horticultural networks that shaped the professionalization of gardening, gardeners’ family lives and employment. A trustee of the Gardens Trust, she has a particular interest in the early gardening press, its editors’ place making in central London and the metropolitan traditions of the nursery and gardening trade.