Boston Flora

Tag: Courtauld

  • Thursday, April 18, 6:00 pm Eastern (Live) and Friday, April 19, 12:00 noon (Virtual Rental) – Cotswolds Manors and Gardens

    The Cotswold hills with their mellow stone cottages, elegant manor houses and imposing castles contain some of the most important historic gardens in England. A virtual history of English gardens can be found in Gloucestershire, parts of Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire. Although little survives of the Roman and medieval periods, some very early gardens remain: Thornbury Castle and Horton Court are two remarkable early 16th century gardens. From the 17th century, the restored gardens at Westbury Court are well known, while ghosts of the late 17th-century gardens at Dyrham Park are more challenging to discover.

    The 18th century is represented in the poetic garden at Rousham, William Kent’s best surviving landscape, as well as in Capability Brown’s most famous garden at Blenheim Palace. Quirkier examples of the English landscape are found at Painswick and Sezincote.

    Modern gardens, too, are impressive: the Arts and Crafts garden at Snowshill and especially Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote Manor, which became a model for so many later garden designs. This lecture covers the history of the English garden, using both famous and little-known gardens, all set in the most unspoiled part of England.

    Presenter Paula Henderson has degrees in art history (University of Chicago, M.A.) and Ph.D. in architectural history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London). She lectures widely in Britain (where she lived for 43 years) and the United States and has published over seventy articles on English Houses and their settings. Her first book, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the 16th and 17th Centuries (published by Yale University Press), won the Berger Prize for the outstanding contribution to the history of British art 2005. Treehouses (co-authored with Adam Mornement) was published by Francis Lincoln, also in 2005. She is currently completing books on London gardens in the age of Shakespeare and on the Landscape as Art.

    She taught courses for the Courtauld Institute of Art Institute for many years and, most recently for the V&A museum. She has lectures for the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, the Architectural Association, both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Birkbeck college, Christie’s Education, The Inchbald School of Design, the V&A museum, the Tate Gallery, The Garden History Society, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Sotheby’s Educational Studies and many others. She led tours for the Courtauld Institute to Florence (‘Gardens of the Medici’) Debyshire (‘Elizabethan architecture’) and the Cotswolds (‘Gardens of the Cotswolds’). While living in England, she also traveled to the United States to lecture for the Society of Architectural Historians, The Garden Club of America, The Royal Oak Foundation, and the Williamsburg Institute. She is a Fellow of Society of Antiquaries of London and now splits her time between Nantucket, MA and Williamsburg, VA.

    This Royal Oak Foundation presentation is $40 for the live event at the General Society Library, 20 W. 44th Street in NYC, with reception following, $30 for the rental, and you may register for the Virtual option HERE or the live option, including reception, HERE

  • Tuesday, March 14, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Garden Technology: A Glittering Tale – A History of the Glasshouse in Britain, Online

    This is the fourth lecture in a six-week series of lectures which will look at the history and development of garden technology from Medieval times right up to the present day. The ‘technology’ of gardening has developed enormously over the past centuries due to mechanization, automation, advances in science – and we can now grow plants without soil, we have automated watering systems for our greenhouses and we can watch while the robot mower, controlled from our smartphones, trims our lawns to perfection. But although we may approach them differently, the tasks and challenges that face gardeners today are much the same as they were back in Tudor times and earlier: preparing the soil, planting, protecting, composting, propagating and so on and so on. The rise in the organic movement over the past few decades has reminded us that the gardeners of old knew at least as much about gardening and working in harmony with nature as we do now, so how have new technologies developed and progressed our gardening knowledge, practice, and techniques?

    The Gardens Trust has engaged a series of expert speakers to examine this question, including the renowned garden writer and designer, Noel Kingsbury, National Trust curator James Rothwell, expert on lawnmowers through the ages Keith Wootton, as well as regular Gardens Trust lecturers Jill Francis and our very own David Marsh; who will take a different technology in turn – tools, fertilizers, pest control, glasshouses, lawnmowers and plant breeding – and explore their history and development in relation to gardening. Tickets £24 or £5 each. Register 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 (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    Since Roman times, people have longed to grow fruits and flowering plants from climates warmer than their own. It is from their resulting endeavors that the humble greenhouse of today emerged, bringing with it the ability to experience horticultural and culinary delights from across the globe. This talk on March 14 with James Rothwell will look at the history of the glasshouse in Britain, from the 17th-century orangery at Ham House to the 1920s greenhouse at Mr Straw’s House in Nottinghamshire. It will also look at the supporting acts that are garden sheds and at how innovations in glasshouse technology have informed building design today beyond the garden, including central heating systems, railway stations and even skyscrapers.

    James Rothwell studied architectural and landscape history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in the Red Books of Humphry Repton. He has been a curator with the National Trust for nearly thirty years. During that time, he has been responsible for a number of estates with important glasshouses, notably Quarry Bank in Cheshire where he oversaw the acquisition and restoration of the kitchen garden, including a range of glass with an early curvilinear iron showhouse.