Boston Flora

Tag: Forgotten Women Gardeners

  • Tuesday, May 24, 5:00 am – A Gardening Philanthropist: Lady Henry Somerset, Online

    The late nineteenth century is considered to be the golden age of British women’s philanthropy and an equally golden age of gardening. This Gardens Trust talk on May 24 at 5:00 am will explore how and why some women incorporated gardening into their philanthropic agency. We will focus on Lady Henry Somerset and her use of gardens to rehabilitate women suffering from substance abuse, as seen in her work Beauty for Ashes published in 1899. A recording link will be sent for you to watch over the coming seven days. £5. Buy tickets HERE

    Leanne Newman has an MA in Garden and Landscape History and is a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton researching the use of gardening and landscape by women philanthropists in the period 1880-1920.

  • Tuesday, May 17, 5:00 am – Forgotten Women Gardeners: Maud Grieve, Online

    Maud Grieve was born in London in 1858. She spent her early married life in India, on their return at the end of the 19th century the couple built a house, The Whin’s in Chalfont St Peter where Maud established a beautiful garden. At the outbreak of World War One she transformed her garden into a herb farm to meet the urgent need for medicinal plants by the pharmaceutical industry. She was also involved in setting up the ‘Herb Growing Association’. She supplied plants and seeds and pamphlets on their cultivation and established a training school for women and ex-servicemen from the colonies. In 1918 she let out her drying shed to the war artists Paul and John Nash where they accomplished some of their finest war commissions. Maud is probably best remembered for her book The Modern Herbal, which was published in 1931, is still relevant today.

    Claire de Carle is the chair and a trustee of Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2022. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Trust’s Research & Recording project in 2013 which has produced reports on around 100 locally important historic gardens. She enjoys researching and writing about little known historic landscape gardens and more recently she has set up two other projects: Artists and their Gardens and Public Parks in Buckinghamshire. She lectures to local groups about Buckinghamshire gardens and Maud Grieve, the herbalist who was the subject of her MA dissertation. Claire lives in Oakley a small village on the Bucks/Oxon border, in her spare time she works on her garden that she and her husband have created over the last seven years.

    This Gardens Trust lecture takes place May 17 at 5 am Eastern, but a recorded link will be sent to watch over the following week. Register HERE

    The Whin’s

  • Tuesday, May 3, 5:00 am – From Gardens to Landscape, Woodbines to Woods: Women at Wrest in a Changing World: Jemima Marchioness Grey and Amabel Hume-Campbell, Countess de Grey of Wrest Park, Online

    Wrest Park is well known for its long association with powerful female garden creators from Lady Elizabeth Talbot (1581-1651) and the ‘Good Countess’ Amabel (1607-98), through to the arrival of the Land Army in the walled garden in the 20th century. This May 3 Gardens Trust talk will contrast the lives and contributions of two of the most influential women on the surviving landscape at Wrest: Jemima Marchioness Grey (1723-97) and Amabel Yorke, Countess de Grey (1751-1833). Their cultural influences and economic contexts provide a dramatic contrast from Jemima’s intellectual rurality within the milieu of Chinoiserie and classical understanding, to the harsher economic realities and political backdrop of enclosure and war experienced by Amabel. We will use their letters and diaries to explore one designed landscape through their two very different lives. The live webinar will take place at 5 am Eastern time, but a recording link is sent the same day to enjoy over the following week at your convenience. £5 through Eventbrite by linking HERE.

    Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs’ talks and books reflect themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. Twigs has a specific interest in the roles of women in and out of the garden, which was the topic of her first book and a particular interest in the women of Wrest Park. Twigs is an accredited Arts Society lecturer and her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion in 2020. She is currently (not quite) working on the equally golden daffodil.

    Portrait of the Ladies Amabel and Mary Jemima Yorke by Joshua Reynolds

  • Tuesday, February 15, 10:00 am GMT – Forgotten Women Gardeners: Viscountess Frances Wolseley, Online

    The Gardens Trust presents the last in a series on Forgotten Women Gardeners with a focus on Viscountess Frances Wolseley at Glynde and Beyone with Garden Historian Twigs Way, on February 15 . £5. Register HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards. The live airing is incredibly early in the US, but the recording link comes very quickly.

    Founder of one of the earliest gardening schools for women, Frances Garnet Wolseley (1872-1936) was a champion of women’s right to work, and a lover of gardens. She was also a prolific author on topics relating both to her gardening school, women’s role on the land, and the countryside of Sussex. Her books on Gardening for Women (1908) and Women on the Land (1916) went beyond the confines of the school to suggest ways in which women could lead a revival of market co-operatives and smallholdings. During the war she took on official roles promoting the employment of women in farming but never lost her interest in the theory and practice of garden design.

    Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs’ talks and books reflect themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. Twigs has a specific interest in the roles of women in and out of the garden, which was the topic of her first book. Twigs is an accredited Arts Society lecturer and her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion in 2020. She is currently working on the equally golden daffodil, but dreams of having a publisher for a biography of Frances Garnet Wolseley.

  • Tuesday, February 1, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, GMT – Forgotten Women Gardeners: A Passion for Plants and Politics, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Online

    This February 1 Gardens Trust online talk focuses on the turbulent life of Lady Dorothy Nevill (1826-1913), who gardened at Dangstein, W. Sussex, where she amassed an enviable plant collection and interacted with Sir William Hooker of Kew and Charles Darwin. Although occasionally tainted by scandal, Lady Dorothy survived it all through a passion for both plants and politics.

    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.

    £5. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite HERE.

  • Tuesday, January 11, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Eastern – Forgotten Women Gardeners: Weeding, Writing, and Illustrating, Online

    Following the success of the Gardens Trust series on gardeners last year they are pleased to be offering six more lectures this time focusing on some less well-known women and their contributions to horticulture.

    This ticket costs £24 for the entire course of 6 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    In this introduction to the series Twigs Way will explore the broader history of women’s involvement in gardens from medieval weeders paid in ale and herrings to Victorian ladies gardening in corsets via ambitious royal creators of botanic gardens and forgotten illustrators. Highlighting the way in which women were forced into the margins of the traditional overview of garden history, we will shine a spotlight on the forgotten, the neglected and the poorly paid to whom the ‘art and craft of gardening’ in its broader context owes its existence.

    Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs’ talks and books reflect themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. Twigs has a specific interest in the roles of women in and out of the garden, which was the topic of her first book. Twigs is an accredited Arts Society lecturer and her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion in 2020. She is currently working on the equally golden daffodil, but dreams of having a publisher for a biography of Frances Garnet Wolseley.