The Gardens Trust is delighted to partner with English Heritage to show you some of the magnificent gardens under their stewardship, guided by the people who know them the best, their Head Gardeners. The series of four online talks will take place on Wednesdays, April 6 – 27, at 1:30 Eastern time. 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. This ticket costs £16 for the entire course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. Please note the slightly later starting time than usual. You may register through Eventbrite by clicking HERE.

April 6 brings Audley End House and Gardens, with Louise Ellis. English Heritage’s Audley End is a grand Jacobean house with a 100-acre garden and landscape situated near the historic market town of Saffron Walden, Essex. The parkland was designed by Capability Brown, and an 1832 Parterre Garden designed by William Sawrey Gilpin has now been restored by English Heritage using appropriate plants. There is a magnificent and again recently restored 2.5 acre walled Kitchen Garden, a Pond Garden with a Pulhamite rockery, and a cascade designed by Richard Woods. Louise Ellis is head Gardener at Audley End. A post she has held since 2018. Originally in social care, Louise switched careers and studied horticulture at Brooksby Melton College in Leicestershire. Additional practical experience was gained working at Wyevale Garden Centre, a local tree and shrub nursery, and large-scale bedding grower. In 2007, after completing the National Diploma in Horticulture, she joined the team at Audley End as a Historic and Botanic Garden Training Programme trainee. Here her career has flourished, and promotions followed first as a temporary Gardener, then Senior Gardener where she focussed on the ornamental gardens at Audley End before her current position as Head Gardener.

April 13 features Down House, with Antony O’Rourke. Down House was the home of Charles and Emma Darwin for 40 years, where they raised their large family. It was at Down House where Darwin, most known for his round the world journey of discovery on HMS Beagle and writing On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, used the grounds and surrounding countryside as his natural ‘Living Landscape Laboratory.’ He used this space to make observations and predictions at a time not known to Victorian society, and carried out meticulous observations on flowers, insectivorous plants and plant movement to discover the processes behind evolutionary theory. Antony O’Rourke is a graduate of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. He has worked in numerous botanical gardens including the University of Bristol, Tresco Abbey in the Isles of Scilly and the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens in Israel where he managed their centre for plant introduction and propagation. Antony is a passionate plants person and has amassed extensive knowledge in the cultivation and natural history of many plant groups. His particular passion is for carnivorous plants, orchids, tropical plants and hardy herbaceous. Antony has been at Down for five years and set about a programme of restoration of Emma Darwin’s mingled border and perennial weed eradication. Says Antony, ‘I’m looking forward to presenting the garden as the Darwin’s would have known it, from the ornamental beds through to the produce grown in the kitchen garden and of course bringing to life the narrative of the experimental Mr. Darwin at Down.’

April 20 takes us to Osborne House, pictured below, on the Isle of Wight with Toby Beasley. Osborne was the seaside home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; a place where they could get away from the pressures of court life and enjoy some privacy. Prince Albert was the driving force behind the improvements at Osborne, taking the property from a Georgian manor house to royal palace. He had no official royal role so he pursued his interests in architecture, agriculture, forestry, and horticulture. This talk will look at the creation of Prince Albert’s Garden and the improvements to the wider estate, the garden’s restoration in the 1990’s and our current task of ‘restoring the restoration’ now that more archive evidence has been uncovered. It will also include some of the challenges we face today in managing and presenting an historical garden and estate. Toby Beasley has spent his entire working life in horticulture. On leaving school he first worked in a nursery growing trees and shrubs and then at Torbay Parks Department. In 1996 he attended Writtle Agricultural College where he gained a BSc Degree in Horticulture, after which he worked at the University of Bristol Botanic Garden. Toby then joined English Heritage where he helped to restore the walled garden at Osborne House, one of English Heritage’s ‘Contemporary Heritage Garden’ project restorations. He was later head gardener at Down House, helping to recreate Darwin’s Garden experiments for visitors to see. In 2008 he returned as head gardener to Osborne House.

Finally, on April 27 we go to Brodsworth Hall and Gardens, Yorkshire, with Daniel Hale. Brodsworth Hall survives as a mid-Victorian vision of a comfortable country house. The formal gardens were primarily laid out in the 1860s but had some Edwardian additions. The gardens were well maintained until the early 20th century but began to slowly decline after the First World War. By the 1990s, when English Heritage acquired the property, the garden was very neglected. This talk will discuss their restoration back to their Victorian grandeur, offering vibrant formal bedding, colourful herbaceous borders, topiary, ferns and more than 100 varieties of roses, and a fine collection of ornamental trees. Daniel Hale has been in the horticulture industry for 15 years. He gained experience as a landscape gardener in his early career before moving into historic gardens. He was acting head gardener at Wentworth Castle gardens before joining English Heritage and has been Head Gardener at Brodsworth Hall since 2015. Daniel has taken a key role in the restoration of the gardens, and loves formal gardens, making Brodsworth the perfect place for him.