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.
