Boston Flora

Tag: Gardens Trust

  • Wednesday, November 18, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern – Lost Gardens of Yorkshire: The Lost Landscapes of Humphry Repton, Online

    This Gardens Trust online talk with Dr, Patrick Eyres on November 18 will focus on the lost Repton landscapes retrieved by conservation at Wentworth Woodhouse and, potentially, at Armley House.

    Only nine Red Books were commissioned for such a large county. Yet they are gems of creative presentation and fashionable design advice. Today, we are fortunate to spot vestiges here and there because each place has been eroded by time and change. Four have become golf courses, and I suspect Repton would have approved. One Red Book was rejected. Another was adapted by the client. Repton published his disapproval, as well as his approval of the repeat commissioning client. The latter was at aristocratic Wentworth Woodhouse, where Repton’s features have been conserved in this century. In Leeds, discussions are underway about re-opening his classic vista of a textile entrepreneur’s commercial empire, which became obscured by trees during the 1980s. Following an overview of the commissions, the talk will focus on the lost Repton landscapes retrieved by conservation at Wentworth Woodhouse and, potentially, at Armley House (a.k.a. Gott’s Park) in Leeds.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust/Yorkshire Gardens Trust members £6). Register with Eventbrite HERE.

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 2 December.

    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 until 2 December) will be sent shortly afterwards.

  • Tuesday, November 17, 5:00 am – 6:00 am Eastern (but recorded) – John Evelyn & the Art of Deception, Online

    This Gardens Trust online talk on November 17 from David Marsh looks at John Evelyn and the Art of Deception in the 17th Century Garden.

    All historical periods have their moments where deceit and illusion was important from the Trojan Horse onwards, but the 17th century took things to a new height. This talk looks at the work of John Evelyn (1620-1706) one the key personalities in the evolution of the modern intellectual world. He was a prolific author and diarist, a founding member of the Royal Society and a friend of Pepys, John Locke, and Christopher Wren as well as artists, scientists and politicians. And he loved contrivance and artificiality in almost field of life including in the garden. Be prepared to be surprised by what he thought he could get away with.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust members £6 ) Register on Eventbrite HERE.

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 1 December.

    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 until 1 December) will be sent shortly afterwards.

  • Tuesday, November 10, 5:00 am – 6:00 am Eastern (but recorded) – The Tradescants, Online

    This Gardens Trust talk on November 10 looks at John Tradescant and his son, also John, who were an extraordinary pair of 17th Century Gardeners.

    John Tradescant and his son, also John were an extraordinary pair: Gardeners to the aristocracy and royalty in the 17th Century, as well as plant hunters, nurserymen and founders of the first museum to be open to the public. Famous in their own lifetimes, and continuously in the centuries since, their lives have even been romanticised by a modern novelist. John senior worked for the Cecil family at Hatfield, and later the Duke of Buckingham, the royal favorite, and traveled to Europe, northern Russia and North Africa collecting plants and other interesting objects. John junior worked alongside his father and in 1637 went to Virginia to collect plants. He succeeded his father a royal gardener a post he lost because of the Civil War. He published a catalogue of their museum which also included plants in the nursery. The pair are buried under the same elaborate and enigmatic tombstone in the grounds of St Mary’s Lambeth, which is now home to the Garden Museum.

    Presenter 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 was co-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 online lecture program and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust members £6 )

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 24 November .

    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 until 24 November) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite UK HERE. Image: One end of the Tradescants’ tomb, St Mary’s Lambeth. Detail from Hollar’s Prospect of London and Westminster from Lambeth 1647.

  • Wednesday, November 4, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern – Gardens of India, Online

    Jill Sinclair kicks off the fall Gardens Trust Wednesday sessions on November 4, with a personal tour of the Gardens of India.

    Join us for a personal tour of some of the great gardens of India. Highlights will include the Mughal emperors’ summer home in the earthly paradise of Kashmir, the gardens created by the British Raj in Calcutta and Delhi, and the wonders of Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh for the newly independent country. Jill Sinclair is a garden historian who lived in Delhi for four years and explored many of the country’s parks and gardens. She has written on early Mughal gardens in Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires (Penn State UP, 2017) and on two Indian gardens for Gardens of the World (DK Travel, 2022). Jill is a trustee of the Gardens Trust.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust members £6 ) Register through Eventbrite UK HERE.

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 18 November.

    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 until 18 November) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    Jill Sinclair is a US-trained landscape historian. She has been a trustee of the Historic Gardens Foundation and co-editor of its magazine, Historic Gardens Review. For several years she taught the history of the English Landscape Garden for Oxford University. Jill is now a trustee of the Gardens Trust, overseeing its education and training work and organizing its program of online talks.

    Jill’s time living and working in the UK, US, France and India has given her the chance to explore many garden styles and cultures, and to relish the joy of places with great stories to tell.

    Image: “Kesar Kyari Bagh, the garden at the Amber Fort, Jaipur” (c) Jill Sinclair

  • Tuesday, October 27, 6:00 am – 7:00 am Eastern (but recorded) – Worshipful Company of Gardeners, Online

    This Gardens Trust talk on October 27 will explain the foundation, early history and collapse of this City Livery Company.

    Gardening is big business today with billions spent on garden makeovers, at garden centers, in municipal parks and on ornamental plants, with vegetable and fruit growing taking second place. Yet until quite recently the reverse was true, Feeding London was the task that occupied most gardeners, with ornamental and leisure gardening comparatively unimportant. The late 16th century saw a series of bad harvests which led to famine conditions in much of England and one of the responses was the foundation of the Gardeners Company, in 1606 by James I. Like other City Livery Companies It was given a monopoly over the whole of its trade so at first it flourished but by the end of the seventeenth century it had virtually no members and collapsed in oblivion. This talk will explain why.…..

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust members £6 )

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 10 November .

    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 until 10 November) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    …..

    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 was co-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 online lecture program and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.

    Image: Cheapside market from Hugh Alley’s Caveat 1598

  • Tuesday, October 20, 5:00 am – 6:00 am Eastern (but recorded) – Let the Sky Rain Potatoes

    Dr. David Marsh and The Gardens Trust present some thoughts on the origins of the English obsession with gardening, online, on October 20.

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that the English are obsessed with gardening. Much less clear is when this obsession started. Was it with Gertrude Jekyll, Capability Brown, or William Kent? This talk argues that it much earlier than you probably think and for reasons that you probably haven’t considered. And what’s it all got to do with Katherine of Aragon, Dr Faustus and mass immigration? There’s only one way of finding out!

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8 (Gardens Trust members £6 ) Register through Eventbrite UK HERE.

    Ticket holders can join the session live and/or view the recording until 3 November .

    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 until 3 November) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    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 was co-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 online lecture programme and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history. Illustration courtesy of The Nature of Shakespeare.

  • Thursday, October 15, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern – Jane Austen & The English Landscape, Online

    Austen is famed for her sharp social satire, but she was also highly attuned to the shifting sensibilities surrounding landscape. From Pride and Prejudice’s wickedly funny take on the Picturesque to the lampooning of real-life landscaper Humphry Repton in Mansfield Park, there is no doubt that Austen had a deep love of the English landscape. She recognized that “to sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”

    Dr Laura Mayer has an MA in Garden History and a PhD in 18th Century patronage. Originally an art historian, she fell into Garden History after working at the Alhambra in Granada. She has published extensively – particularly on Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and on Jane Austen’s contemporary, Humphry Repton. Laura shares Elizabeth Bennett’s appreciation of Gilpin’s picturesque, as well as her talent for tramping about a garden inappropriately shod. She has worked as a consultant for the National Trust, English Heritage and Land and Heritage. She lectures regularly for the Gardens Trust and Cambridge Botanic Gardens.

    This October 15 online talk is sponsored by the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust. £4 for members; £5 for non-members. Booking is through Eventcube. Visit www.ogt.org.uk for registration.

  • Wednesday, May 20, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – A Loudon Celebration: Prospects of Perambulation, Online

    The fifth in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of The Gardener’s Magazine takes place May 20 at 1 pm Eastern.

    It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’

    In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.

    Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realize how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.

    Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. Tickets to the May 20 session may be purchased 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 until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    This talk reconsiders John Claudius Loudon as not only an eminent landscape gardener and encyclopaedist, but as a visionary urban thinker. Through analysis of his publications and his design for Gravesend Terrace Gardens, it will explore the meanings of the Gardenesque – a style which Loudon evolved and defined over the course of his career. The aesthetic and reformist ideals underpinning this unique approach to landscape design help frame his macro-scale response to the anxieties of the industrial city, which took the form of a radical plan in his 1829 Gardener’s Magazine. Loudon’s prescient proposal, which imagined London growing in alternating, concentric zones of town and country, arguably deserves a place in the lineage of Green Belt thinking. Gardenesque Urbanism, as presented here, perhaps represents an overlooked approach to the reconciliation of urban growth with the innate human affinity for open space.

    Patrick Smith is an architectural designer at IID Architects – a Richmond-based practice which specializes in the education sector. He previously studied Sculpture at Central Saint Martins, and then Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge, he became interested in landscape theory and its intersection with urban design. For his research into the work of John Claudius Loudon, he was awarded the 2025 Mavis Batey Essay Prize by the Gardens Trust.

  • Tuesdays, May 12 & 26, 5:00 am – 7:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Crisis in Historic Parks & Gardens, Online

    An online presentation and discussion on the Climate Change and Loss of Biodiversity Crisis, with the Gardens Trust, begins May 12.

    Our changing climate and the loss of biodiversity are two of the biggest and most urgent challenges facing historic parks and gardens. Join us for a pair of half-day online events to explore some of the latest research and initiatives in these two vital areas.

    Each session will last around 2.5 hours, with talks from sector experts and the opportunities for questions to be raised from the audience.

    These talks and the subsequent discussions will be relevant for anyone working or volunteering in a historic park or garden – or seeking ideas to apply in your own garden at home.

    This ticket is for a single ONLINE talk, price £14 (GT members £10.50). A recording will be made available to ticket holders to view until 12 June. If you would prefer to purchase tickets to both talks at the discounted price of £20 (GT members £15), please follow the link here.

  • Wednesday, March 18, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern- Mythical Gardens: Eden, Online

    Join The Gardens Trust for a new four part series wandering through allegorical gardens with Dr David Marsh

    In a garden, art, science, nature and the mind collide. It is no surprise then, that many stories in ancient religions and philosophies are set in gardens. Christians believe that the Garden of Eden once existed before Adam and Eve were expelled from it, while the Hanging Garden of Babylon has captivated the creative imagination of humans for centuries, as have legends about the Gardens of the Hesperides in the ancient Mediterranean world. Like ancient Chinese stories about the magical gardens on Mount Kunlun and its counterpart Mount Penglai, they all reflect the complex interaction between the human and divine worlds. In this series we will not only be looking be looking at the myths themselves but also, where possible, the reality that lay behind them and their impact on gardens more recently. This ticket costs £28 for the entire course of 4 sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £8 [Gardens Trust members £21 or £6 each]. Register at www.eventbrite.co.uk. 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 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    Most of us, even if we are not Christians, will know the Bible story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden – or think we do. In fact, the Book of Genesis says very little about Eden, and nothing really about what it was like or what, apart from the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, grew in it. I suspect that whatever else you think you know it’s because the story of Eden is the most popular Old Testament subject in Christian art, and you’ve simply absorbed the way that artists have imagined it. Do you even know where it was? Most of us I’m sure would say without much hesitation – somewhere in the Middle East, but you might be surprised to know that about eighty different locations have been proposed – from the Baltic to Polynesia, and from the North Pole to China, via Kashmir, the Seychelles, and of course several states of America.