David Marsh

Tuesday, October 8, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – A History of Gardens 2: The Baroque in England, Online

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What is a garden? Why were they created as they were? What influences were at play in garden making, and how have gardens evolved and developed over time? These are the questions we will explore as we traverse the history of gardens through the ages.

Following on from our opening talks on early gardens, this second series will examine how gardens developed during the 17th century. We will explore how exotic plants from around the world started to appear in European gardens, and were captured in botanical art, before the tumultuous impact of the English civil wars on gardens and gardening from the 1640s. The second part of the century saw the rise of extravagant, dramatic styles, now known as baroque gardens and exemplified by the work of André Le Nôtre for the Sun King at Versailles. We will explore these gardens through an analysis of the work of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries in France, and the series will end with a talk scrutinizing how the European baroque style played out in England.

This ticket – purchase through Eventbrite HERE – is for this individual talk and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire [second] series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25) Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards.

After the civil war Charles and many of his court circle went into exile in Europe where they saw the glories of French and Dutch gardens. They fell in love with their ornate geometric formal layout, and on their return at the Restoration tried to recreate the grandeur of the European baroque in British gardens. At the same time the foundation of the Royal Society encouraged the development of botany as a new science while the financial revolution of the late 17th century spread an interest in gardening into the ranks of the new ‘middling sort’ and led to a thriving horticultural scene to serve them.

Dr David Marsh was awarded his PhD in 2005 for a study of the ‘Gardens and Gardeners of Later-Stuart London’ and has been lecturing and supervising research in Garden History ever since. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and is course director for their MA in Garden History. A trustee of the Gardens Trust from 2016-2023, he helped set up and run the Trust’s on-line lecture programme and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.

Tuesday, September 10, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – A History of Gardens 2 – Early 17th Century Plants and Gardens, Online

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This is the first in The Gardens Trust’s online course The History of Gardens 2, on Tuesdays. Sponsored by Wooden Books. Tickets £8 each (GT members £6) Tickets available 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 will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks.

What is a garden? Why were they created as they were? What influences were at play in garden making, and how have gardens evolved and developed over time? These are the questions we will explore as we traverse the history of gardens through the ages.

Following on from our opening talks on early gardens, this second series will examine how gardens developed during the 17th century. We will explore how exotic plants from around the world started to appear in European gardens, and were captured in botanical art, before the tumultuous impact of the English civil wars on gardens and gardening from the 1640s. The second part of the century saw the rise of extravagant, dramatic styles, now known as baroque gardens and exemplified by the work of André Le Nôtre for the Sun King at Versailles. We will explore these gardens through an analysis of the work of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries in France, and the series will end with a talk scrutinising how the European baroque style played out in England.

“God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.” This is the well-known opening line of Francis Bacon’s essay On Gardens, first published in 1625. It sums up the early 17th century’s growing obsession with plants and horticulture. While Continental designers, engineers and sculptors transformed the structure and style of the English garden, plants began to take center stage. They became desirable consumer items, eagerly sought out and highly prized as European exploration opened up the world. At the same time the Worshipful Company of Gardeners chartered by James I helped establish horticulture not only as a profession covering garden making, market gardening and the first proper plant nurseries but as an important contributor to the national economy.

Dr David Marsh was awarded his PhD in 2005 for a study of the ‘Gardens and Gardeners of Later-Stuart London’ and has been lecturing and supervising research in Garden History ever since. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and is course director for their MA in Garden History. A trustee of the Gardens Trust from 2016-2023, he helped set up and run the Trust’s on-line lecture program and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.

Monday, February 5, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern – The Gardens and Green Spaces of Early Modern London, Online

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London today is one of the greenest cities in the world but was it always so? This London Parks & Gardens Trust online talk on February 5 at 1 pm will explore the origins and changing uses of the city’s gardens and green spaces - parks, churchyards, commercial gardens as well as private gardens – during the 16th to 18th centuries,  to show they were not just places to hunt, grow food or bury the dead but places of  elaborate displays of wealth and status for the rich, a source of pleasure and recreation for the less well-to-do, and a place of very hard work for the garden laborers who toiled in them.

Dr David Marsh researches, lectures and writes on any and all aspects of garden history, and helps organise the Garden History seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and is the founder and inspiration behind their  extensive on-line lecture program. For the last ten years he has also written a weekly garden history blog for them which you can find at  thegardenstrust.blog – he has written over 400 posts so far! £5.00 The ticket entitles you to attend the online lecture as well as accessing a recording of the event for a week after. Register at https://bookwhen.com/londongardenstrust#focus=ev-smpl-20240205180000

Tuesday, March 28, 6:00 am – 7:30 am (but recorded) – Garden Technology: What Made Our Garden Grow? A History of Poo, Online

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This is the last 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 them). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

On March 28, David Marsh will expound on A History of Poo. David Marsh is one of my favorite presenters, and the talk is sure to be a delight. As he writes:

“If you asked me to think of a title that would turn most people off buying a ticket for a lecture I’d guess the History of Fertilizer would be near the top of the list… but be prepared to be surprised. It isn’t as boring as it sounds, and in fact there’s are laughs and gasps a-plenty as we explore the smelly, messy and often unpleasant story of what made your garden grow- from dinosaurs to Victorian plutocrats, from cholera to fossil fir-cones and from Thames barges to the collapse of the Spanish Empire, via with words of wisdom from Samuel Pepys, Shirley Hibberd and Humphry Davy. In fact, so sure am I that you won’t find hearing about recycled excrement and superphosphates dull that you can have your money back if I can’t convince you that it isn’t!”

David Marsh is a garden historian, lecturer and writer. He obtained a PhD in Garden History from Birkbeck College in 2005. Since 2011 he has been co-convener of the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London University. He leads the Gardens Trust’s team who organize online courses and lectures, and also writes the Gardens Trust’s weekly blog.

Thursday, December 1 – The 19th Century Garden: Nurseries and Seedsmen, Online

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Much of the driving force behind the development of gardens during the Victorian period was due to the success and enterprise of Britain’s nurseries and seedsmen. They led the way in scouring the globe for new plants for British gardens and greenhouses, introducing them in to commercial production and encouraging the spread. of gardening through cheap and reliable seeds. Companies like Carters, Suttons and Veitches transformed British horticulture in just a few generations, becoming internationally important businesses. But they were not alone. There were dozens of others, smaller in scale, but no less important in impact, taking advantage of improved rail networks, cheap postage and printing, as well as increased leisure time. This Gardens Trust online talk on December 1 will tell their story, primarily through the example of Carters Seeds, which was the largest in Britain and later one of the largest in the world. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5 – 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. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

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

Thursday, November 3 – Painting the Gardens of the Golden Age, Online

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Ask most people to describe the greatest days of British garden history and they’ll probably end up talking about the grand gardens of Edwardian England where lots of staff worked on maintaining huge flower borders, vast kitchen gardens and seemingly endless shrubberies. In other words the sort of garden that has been labelled the Golden Age of gardening in Britain. Is that a realistic view? By the late C19th Britain had moved from being a rural to an urban nation. Cities expanded but nostalgia for the countryside was widespread, while new suburbs developed a culture of their own. Technology and mechanization continued to change life, usually but not always for the better, but there were also constant calls to return to traditional methods, which were reflected in gardens. While nurseries filled our gardens with huge numbers of new plants from round the world, at the same time there was greater interest in wild flowers and natural planting. This affected garden styles and designs, and everything became possible – from imitation exotic Japanese gardens to reimagined “Tudorbethan” parterres and blowsy labor-intensive herbaceous borders. At the same time interest in horticulture spread right across the social scale as seed companies enabled anyone with a little space and a few spare pennies to take up gardening for themselves.

So while it’s true that in many ways this truly was a Golden Age it’s also true that it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.

This ticket is for the entire course of 6 sessions. or you may purchase a ticket for upcoming individual sessions, costing £5 via the links found at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-c19th-garden-part-4-tickets-445595426917 Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

On November 3, the first talk in the series will look those artists who created the impression that the period leading up to the Great War was the Golden Age of British gardening. As we have seen in previous lectures gardens were never a major subject for artists until the mid-C19th but then they takes center stage. This is partly because of a growing interest in gardening and partly because art was now becoming more commercialized. Many garden artists worked in watercolor, a much more affordable medium for the growing number of middle class collectors. There were more artists societies, more commercial galleries and exhibitions of living artists work and more opportunities for their work to be used in colour in books, magazines and prints.

In the last series we saw the work of artists like Myles Birkett Foster and Frederic Walker who painted prettified and idealized versions of the gardens of the rural poor, but from the 1880s onwards they were joined on the gallery wall by those of artists like George Elgood and Arthur Rowe who preferred the gardens of the rural rich whose country house estates combined nostalgia for old-fashioned gardens with historical revivalism in architecture. Their paintings were romantic in style, lush and soft in colour and light and its gardens of the Golden Age are their creation

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 programme and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at https://thegardenstrust.blog

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

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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.

Wednesday, May 4, 1:00 pm – Medieval Splendour: London’s Palace Gardens and Royal Beasts, Online

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Would you expect to find a dragon in a Richmond Garden? A greyhound on a pole in Westminster? Or a griffin lurking in a hedge in Bexley? Probably not: but all those beasts and many more lived in the gardens of Tudor royal palaces and aristocratic mansions. Find out how and why in this lecture by David Marsh which will explore one of the most visually spectacular aspects of late 15th and 16th England and their legacy in gardens since then.

Dr. David Marsh researches, lectures and writes on any and all aspects of garden history, and helps organize the Garden History seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and organizes their extensive on-line program. For the last eight years he has also written a weekly garden history blog for them which you can find at thegardenstrust.blog

This talk is the first in our series on Wednesdays presented in association with London Gardens Trust £5 each or all 4 for £16. 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. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

Tuesdays, March 22 – April 12, Very Early in the Morning (but recorded sessions available for one week) – Forgotten Women Gardeners, Series Two, Online

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This Gardens Trust series of four online talks introduces more unsung women gardeners, on Tuesdays from March 22 – April 12, at 10 am Greenwich Mean Time, which means 6 am Eastern. However, a link to the recorded session will be sent and available for one week should you choose not to get up that early. This ticket costs £16 for the entire course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions for £5 each through Eventbrite. The first series was completely engaging – we highly recommend.

Week one covers Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe, with David Marsh. Within a few months of marrying Otway Wheeler-Cuffe, a military engineer, Charlotte Williams found herself in a tiny colonial outpost in the far north of newly conquered Burma. A keen gardener and painter, she was soon bored of the usual pastimes of imperial wives and took up plant-hunting in the largely unexplored mountains and forests around the base. This was to lead to her becoming the key player in the founding of the National Botanic Garden of Burma – the last botanic garden to be founded in the empire and one done by a group of private individuals.

After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account and did an MA and then a PhD in garden history. Now he lectures on garden history anywhere that will listen to him and helps organize the Garden History Seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is co-chair of the Education and Events Committee of The Gardens Trust, for whom he organizes courses and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at The Gardens Trust Blog.

Week two’s talk is The Well-Connected Gardener, Alicia Amherst, Founder of Garden History, with Sun Minter. Alicia Amherst was a woman of remarkable gifts and energy. Not only was she passionate about plants and gardens, being both an observant botanist and a very practical gardener, she was active in politics, becoming prominent in the British Women’s Emigration Association and, after World War I, in the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. Her seminal book, A History of Gardening in England, was enormously influential in its time whilst London Parks and Gardens (1907) and Historic Gardens of England (1938) are important historical records, the first of which has never really been superseded in the comprehensive treatment of its subject. She was the recipient of many honours during her lifetime, but the one which gave her the greatest pleasure was being given the freedom of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners in 1896.

Week three is The Amazing Life of Taki Handa, with Jill Raggett.

This talk will tell the story of several unconventional women who stepped outside their social norms to go on adventures overseas but in particular focuses on the Japanese teacher and horticulturist Handa Taki (1871-1956). It will uncover the research process used to understand how it came to be that in the early 1900s there was a Japanese woman with the relevant skills in Britain to act as garden designer for Ella Christie and ‘wave a magic wand’ over the garden at Cowden, Scotland, but that was only the start of Handa’s fascinating life.

Jill Raggett is a long-time member of the Japanese Garden Society and has studied historic Japanese-style gardens in Britain and Ireland for the last 30 years. She is an Emeritus Reader in Gardens and Designed Landscapes and is a tutor and assessor for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Master of Horticulture qualification. Jill is normally to be found in her garden trying to find a place for one more plant.

The final talk, on April 12, is From Hairy Leaves to a White Cat: Lady Anne Monson (1726 – 1776) and Lady Mary Coke (1727 – 1811) with Dr. Catherine Horwood.

This talk examines the lives of Lady Anne Monson (1726-1776) and Lady Mary Coke (1727-1811), one a plantswoman, the other a gardener, and explores the way in which society scandals and horticultural friendships shaped these women’s experiences in the long 18th century.

Dr Catherine Horwood is an experienced speaker and the author of many books on social history including Gardening Women. Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010) and Potted History – How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (Pimpernel Press, 2020). Her biography Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants (Pimpernel Press, 2019) was selected as the European Garden Book of the Year in 2020.

Register HERE.