Join the Garden Museum online on June 3 for a talk bringing together two leading voices in the world of gardens: acclaimed photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo and celebrated garden designer and writer Tania Compton. They will explore the rose in image-making and landscape design, in famous gardens throughout the world.
After 3000 years of cultivation the rose continues to seduce, and through conversation and exquisite images from Ngoc’s new book, they will discuss and celebrate a flower that has greater variety and popularity than almost any other. Ngoc and Tania will also reflect on the creative process, the power of photography to shape how we experience gardens, and the stories that emerge when design and documentation come together. £10 Livestream Book at www.gardenmuseum.org.uk
Join garden designers Nigel Dunnett and Tom Hoblyn for an exclusive insight into how they created their show gardens for this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The livestream will be available May 21 from noon – 1 Eastern, and will be available thereafter on demand. £10 Livestream. Register at www.gardenmuseum.org.uk
Nigel Dunnett is Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture at the University of Sheffield, and a gold-medal winning designer and author. He is one of the world’s leading voices on innovative planting design and ecological horticulture. He’ll be talking about his remarkable sand dune garden which takes its inspiration from the coastal location of charity partner Hospitalfield Arts in Arbroath. The garden interprets this landscape through the eyes of an artist, and creates a dramatic, highly sculptural topography. At the heart of the garden is an outdoor artists’ studio. The planting is resilient and forward-looking, and is established in sand, provoking discussions about trends for planting in low-fertility mineral substrates rather than rich topsoils for climate-adaptation. The garden features a dune pool, which collects rainwater from the studio and the surrounding dunes.
Tom Hoblyn is a RHS Chelsea Flower Show veteran who has created the Hospice UK – Garden of Compassion at the show this week. The garden has been designed for patients and families at the end of life. Drawing from his deep connection to the Mediterranean landscapes he’s explored on plant hunting trips, Tom has crafted a garden that combines the grounding presence of natural stone with the calming effects of drought-tolerant plants. Tom has used materials from the North East of England (as the garden is being relocated to St Cuthbert’s Hospice in Durham after the Show) and he has worked with extraordinary artisans on the sculptural benches and water features, to make a garden that aims to support both the emotional and physical needs of those in hospice care.
The Garden Museum is delighted to host the official launch of garden writer Clare Coulson’s new book, Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home, showcasing the stunning private gardens of eighteen leading landscape architects and garden designers. The event will be streamed online on April 15 from 3 – 4 pm Eastern, and is £10 Livestream.
With breathtaking photography by Éva Németh, the book offers a rare glimpse into the inventive and idiosyncratic ways these designers craft their own gardens, some of which have been photographed for the first time.
Miranda Brooks, one of eighteen designers featured in the book, will join Clare in conversation to discuss her career in landscape, which has taken her from apprenticing with Arabella Lennox-Boyd to founding her eponymous landscape studio in New York, where one of her first commissions was to create a garden for Anna Wintour.
Miranda’s gardens are distinctive yet completely timeless, with a deep sense of the pastoral and a connectivity to nature. Alongside discussion of her design practice, the talk will also cover her latest project developing the gardens and landscape at her home in Gloucestershire, which includes an expansive kitchen garden, herbaceous borders and meadows, all of which is managed biodynamically. Book at https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/events/talk-wonderlands-british-garden-designers-at-home/?mc_cid=40c0190e3d&mc_eid=03faa403db
Christopher Woodward explores the history of swimming pools as features in the design of private gardens from the 17th-century until 1939. This Garden Museum program will be livestreamed on April 8 at 7 pm – 8 pm Greenwich Mean Time, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what that means in your time zone, but you will be able to access the talk after the event with a link which will be sent to registrants. The cost of the livestream is £10. Buy your ticket at https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/product/livestream-christophers-lecture-08-04-25/.
In this talk, Christopher Woodward will begin by discussing candidates for the earliest swimming pool in Britain, and the distinction between cold bath and swimming pool in the Georgian age; public swimming pools became a phenomenon of the Victorian city but it was not until the Edwardian age that country house gardens gave centre stage to the pool as an ornamental feature.
The 1920s and ‘30s were the Golden Age of the swimming pool, owing to a heady cocktail of Hollywood movies and Country Life magazine, chlorinated water and elasticated swimsuit – and for the first time men and women swimming together in a fashionable new sport.
This talk is research in progress by Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum. Christopher is an architectural historian and a swimmer, who has recently swum 100 kilometres in Greece to raise funds for the new public garden of Lambeth Green. He reviews swimming pools for Country Life, the Telegraph and the Financial Times.
Hosted in partnership with The Gardens Trust, this Garden Museum livestreamed course provides an introduction to the history of gardens and garden design through the ages. This course offers students with little or no previous knowledge a chronological panorama of the development of garden history from medieval and Tudor gardens through to the twentieth century, and will end with the 21st century, tomorrow’s history in the making!
The sixteen lectures will run over four Saturdays, January 18 – February 8, and be delivered by well-known speakers and experts in their fields.
Week One: Saturday January 18 2025
What is garden history with Tim Richardson
Overview of the early modern era with Jill Francis
John Tradescant naturalist, gardener, collector with speaker TBA
Looking at surviving 17th century gardens with Jill Francis
Week Two: Saturday 25 January 2025
Setting the scene of the Georgian era with Dr. Twigs Way
Looking at landscape parks with Dr .Twigs Way
Looking follies and grottoes with Peter Cooke
Understanding picturesque landscapes with Dr. Deborah Evans
Week Three: Saturday 1 February 2025
Setting the scene on the Victorian era with Francesca Murray
High Victorian design with Ben Dark
Working class gardening with Ben Dark
Looking at the arts and crafts garden with Cherrill Sands
Week Four: Saturday 8 February 2025
Modern women gardeners with Caroline Holmes
Overview of the 20th & 21st Century with Tim Richardson
Post industrial landscapes with John Little
Planting styles in the 20th century flower garden with Andrew Wilson
Livestream 4-week course: £100. Livestream single day: £30. Register at www.gardenmuseum.org.uk
The Garden Museum is pleased to share with you a film celebrating the gardens of the Excalibur Estate in Catford, South London, directed by Peter Kindersley and presented by Matthew Wilson, garden designer, and writer.
The Excalibur Estate is an estate of prefab bungalows begun in 1946 for families bombed out of their homes. For many it was a chance to make a garden; seventy years later, the Excalibur Estate is as rich in horticulture and biodiversity as any hectare of London. But the Excalibur is being demolished and the gardens vanishing.
Matthew Wilson’s Uncle Jim was one of the first residents. Last month he visited Excalibur to record the gardens, and look for traces of a favourite uncle. Along the way he met a few of the residents who shared the stories of their beloved gardens.
Faced with the challenges of the climate crisis and increasing biodiversity loss, we are at a crucial crossroads in our engagement with the rest of the natural world.
In an event to mark the launch of his new book Gardening in a Changing World, Darryl Moore had a conversation with Nigel Dunnett and Arit Anderson, discussing our past and present relationships with plants, and how we need to rethink our attitudes to them.
Gardening in a Changing World explores recent developments in horticulture, ecology and plant science, alongside traditional ecological knowledge and advances in the environmental humanities. The book pushes beyond the notion that gardening is always good for the planet, highlighting alternative approaches to how we can design, inhabit and enjoy our gardens and public green spaces, for the benefit of not only our species, but also all the others we share these places with. This one hour film is a recording of a talk which took place at the Garden Museum in October 2022. Purchase at https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/film-library/darryl-moore-gardening-in-a-changing-world/
Come to the opening of the Rotch-Jones-Duff House & Garden Museum Holiday Exhibit and Wreath Silent Auction on Friday, December 4, from 6 – 8 pm. Enjoy fabulous hors d’oeuvre and yuletide spirits in the festively decorated rooms of the Museum. Take home a beautiful wreath, custom designed by volunteers. $40 members, $45 non-members. For tickets, directions and more information, log on to www.rjdmuseum.org.
