Boston Flora

Tag: Alton Towers

  • Tuesday, October 14, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – From the Archives: William Andrews Nesfield, Reconsidered

    The five part Gardens Trust and Garden Museum series on William Andrews Nesfield concludes on October 14 with a round table discussion. This will draw together some of the themes and trends that have emerged from the series, highlight and debate further Nesfield designs, and share ideas for using the archives to re-examine Nesfield’s style, his significance during his lifetime and his legacy today.

    Participants will include Ben Dark, author, head gardener, award-winning broadcaster and landscape historian, who gave the keynote talk at the Garden Museum’s launch of the Nesfield archives; Advolly Richmond, plant, garden and social historian, who has studied Nesfield’s designs at Alton Towers; Christina Hourigan, whose doctoral research includes examining Nesfield’s work at Kew; Rob Hillman, archivist at the Garden Museum; and some of the speakers from the earlier sessions in the series.

    If you are involved in any way with individual Nesfield commissions (for instance as researcher, guide, gardener or volunteer), we’d be delighted if you’d join this session and share information about your site. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the talk ( and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks. Register HERE.

  • Wednesday, February 19, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Places to Play: Alton Towers, an Early Regency Theme Park

    Designed landscapes are typically defined as places laid out for artistic effect or aesthetic purposes, somewhere to contemplate and admire. Yet many people have a much more active relationship with outdoor spaces, engaging with them for jogging, cycling, ball games, playgrounds and carnival rides. They are places to play.

    This Gardens Trust series will examine the relationship between historic designed landscapes and organized recreation. We’ll be exploring children’s outdoor play, a world-famous theme park set among a Grade 1 Regency landscape, a Premier League football stadium that was once a Victorian pleasure ground, an early 18th-century estate that is now a golf course, and a Victorian public park which was opposed by local workers despite its claimed recreational and health-giving benefits.

    This ticket (register HERE) is for this individual session and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 or £26.25). 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 for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    Week Two: Many people will have experienced the thrills and spills of a day out to Alton Towers with its famous attractions. But long before the gravity defying rides arrived, Alton Towers and its range of ‘pick and mix’ garden features and eclectic planting had already developed a reputation as a ‘Theme Park’ in its own right. Created by the 15th Earl of Shrewsbury between 1814 and 1827, Alton Towers became one of the most renowned gardens to visit in the Regency and Victorian age.

    In this talk, Advolly will examine the history and development of a unique garden that survived quietly, and has now been fully restored, while all eyes were focused on the donkey rides and rollercoasters.

    Advolly Richmond is a plants, gardens and social historian based in Shropshire. A Fellow of the Linnean Society, she is also a Champion for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She lectures and writes on a range of subjects and is currently teaching A Social and Cultural History of Italian Renaissance Gardens at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. Advolly’s new book A Short History of Flowers: The stories that make our gardens (Frances Lincoln) was published in March 2024. She also contributes garden history features on BBC`s Gardeners World and produces ‘The Garden History Podcast.’

    ©Advolly Richmond

  • Thursday, September 22, 5:00 am – The 19th Century Garden: The Global Garden, Online

    The Gardens Trust’s third set of lectures on the C19th garden takes us towards its heyday. As Britain’s empire expanded plant hunters scoured the world to bring home plants to fill the gardens and greenhouses not just of the rich but an ever-growing middle class. Gardening became a hobby, and indeed a passion for many in the working class too. As a result, gardening books and magazines flourished, and horticulture became big business. Garden design, like architecture became more and more eclectic. Labour was cheap so extravagance and display became commonplace in the private realm while public parks, often on a grand scale, were created all over the country, but especially in urban areas. Inevitably however there was a reaction against such artifice and excess, with a call for the return to more natural styles, and by the end of the century the cottage garden was vying with the lush herbaceous border to be the defining feature of the late Victorian garden.

    On Thursday, September 22, David Marsh will speak on The Global Garden. The Victorian garden was a truly global space. The growth of empire went hand in hand with changes in technology and the development of commercial nurseries and plant hunting. This lecture will show how grand gardens such as Biddulph Grange and Alton Towers were designed around the arrival of a vast array of exotic plants, but also exotic architecture. Eclectism ruled… while Italianate and Gothic continued to be the predominant styles you could find Egyptian temples and Swiss chalets, as well as Himalayan valleys and American forests, while inside conservatories and glasshouses you could explore the flora of every corner of the world. And it wasn’t long before that was true of the gardens of suburban villas and terraced cottages as well.

    After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, Dr David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account. He was awarded a PhD in 2005 and now lectures about garden history anywhere that will listen to him. Recently appointed an honorary Senior Research Fellow by the University of Buckingham, he is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and chairs their Education Committee. He oversees their on-line program and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at https://thegardenstrust.blog. £5 each or all 6 for £30. Register HERE.