Boston Flora

Tag: Decimus Burton

  • Thursday, May 5, 5:00 am – Kew’s Palm House, Online

    This Gardens Trust talk on May 5 is the second in our 2nd series on Victorian Gardens on Thurs @ 10.00 GMT (5 am Eastern). £5 each or all 6 for £30. 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.

    At the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, the royal gardens at Kew were regarded as an unnecessary expense and threatened with closure. Saved by a press and parliamentary campaign, Kew was transferred from royal to public ownership in 1840, and Sir William Hooker was appointed director.

    To build Kew’s status, Hooker persuaded the royal family to grant more land and commissioned a magnificent new Palm House. Designed by iron-founder Richard Turner and architect Decimus Burton, the Palm House employed the latest in engineering technology. Hailed as ‘the glory of the gardens’, the Palm House offered Londoners the experience of a day trip to the tropics. Britain’s foremost landscape designer, William Nesfield, laid out the surrounding grounds to make the Palm House the centrepiece of Kew.

    Kate Teltscher explores the function of the Palm House as imperial symbol and botanical spectacle. She traces Hooker’s transformation of Kew from small run-down garden into splendid national botanic establishment. Dr Kate Teltscher is a cultural historian and writer. Her most recent book is the acclaimed Palace of Palms: Tropical Dreams and the Making of Kew (Picador, 2020). She is an Emeritus Fellow of the School of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, Honorary Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

  • Tuesday, April 12, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern Time – From Royal Hunting Ground to Parks for People and Nature: A Celebration and History of London’s Parks, Online

    This really is a fascinating insight into the history of one of the greatest ever institutions – the British public park. Many Americans have enjoyed them at some time in their lives but what do we really know about them? Their origins? Did they really start in the Victorian period or do they go even further back? This London Gardens Trust talk on April 12 illustrates their origins, talks about the need for parks, the Victorian heyday, what makes a great park, with examples of lodges, lakes, bandstands, fountains and floral displays, to their great decline in the sixties and seventies. However, the subsequent revival has led to a major shift in interest in our parks and once again we are much in love with them. This is also a highly illustrative talk accompanied by slides with examples of parks from across London and other parts of the UK and their designs and architecture. This is a particularly popular talk and always goes down well as we can nearly always recount our own experiences with our own local park.

    Paul Rabbitts is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and Royal Society of Arts, parks historian, Head of Parks, Heritage and Culture at Watford Borough Council, public speaker, and chair of the Parks Management Association.  He is also the author of over 25 books, that include the history of public parks, The Royal Parks, the architect Decimus Burton, bandstands as well as books on local architecture in Amberley Publishing’s ’50 Buildings’ series on Britain’s towns and cities. 

    £6.00. Book HERE.