Boston Flora

Tag: artists gardens

  • Wednesday, April 9, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Derek Jarman’s Garden, Online

    Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. 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. Register through Eventbrite HERE

    The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely talented theater director, filmmaker and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station, almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.

    Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and still contributes to the MA program on West Midlands History at Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer in a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust online program, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press (2018).

    Image: Derek Jarman’s Cottage and Garden, photo ©Jill Francis

  • Wednesday, April 2, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Painters in their Places, Online

    Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. 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. Register through Eventbrite HERE.

    Gardens, fashions, sculpture and antique culture meet and mix as we move between France, Spain, Italy and England with artists who both recorded and, in the case of Sorolla and le Sidaner, created gardens. The third artist is John Singer Sargent. On April 2 we will examine the concepts of the role of gardens in art and culture more generally as exampled and contrasted by these three artists.

    Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher fascinated by the past and intrigued by the role of flowers, gardens and landscape in art and culture of all kinds. Her talks reflect themes of, class and gender, politics, art and literature along with the quirky and unusual. Twigs is Course Director of the MA/PhD in Garden History at Buckingham University and an accredited Arts Society lecturer. Her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion (2020) and the new edition of A History of Women in the Garden was published by Bloomsbury (2023). Image: Les Jardins Henri Le Sidaner, Gerberoy, photo ©Twigs Way

  • Wednesday, March 26, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Gardens of the North American Impressionists

    Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. 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. Register through Eventbrite HERE.

    North American Impressionists were inspired by what was happening in European art. In 1872 American artist William Merritt Chase told the New York Times ‘My God, I would rather go to Europe than go to Heaven!’ Philadelphia’s 1876 World’s Fair Centennial International Exhibition inspired the quest for ‘olden tyme’ plants and poetry, fulfilled by Childe Hassam’s muse, the poet Celia Thaxter on Appledore Island. Parallels can be drawn between Monet at Giverny and the gardens created by John Henry Twachtman at Greenwich, Connecticut and the Cos Cob and Old Lyme Art Colonies in the same state. In 1893 Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition which featured the mural Primitive Woman by Mary Fairchild MacMonnies facing Modern Woman by Mary Cassatt. Gardens and children were ingeniously combined by Cassatt and Canadian Impressionist Helen MacNicoll. Tired of narrow artistic traditions at home, three generations of American artists including Frederick Frieseke travelled to Monet’s Giverny to live, or lodge at the Hotel Baudy.

    Caroline Holmes is a University of Cambridge ICE Academic Tutor and Course Director; has lectured in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Europe and Japan as well as for cruises crossing the Baltic, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Red Seas, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Author of 12 books including Monet at Giverny, Water Lilies and Bory Latour-Marliac, the genius behind Monet’s water lilies; and Impressionists in their Gardens, she is a consultant designer specialising in evoking historic, artistic and symbolic references, and contributes to Viking TV. Her website is https://horti-history.com. Image: detail, On the Terrace by John Henry Twatchman (c.1890-1900), Smithsonian American Art Museum, public domain