Boston Flora

Tag: Gardens Trust

  • Thursday, March 16, 10:00 am GMT (but recorded) – C20 Garden Part 2 – Margery Fish and the Cottage Garden Movement, Online

    Created and re-created against the backdrop of cycle of war and peace with its accompanying social and economic impacts, the twentieth century garden pivots between tradition and modernism, informality and structure. The century sees a shift in both style and materials as concrete takes its place at the heart of new towns and spaces, whilst the country house garden struggles to survive and flourish again in a new order. Garden design increasingly reflects the needs of a wider range of society, whilst literary and artistic movements locate gardens at the very heart of the struggle for meaning in a world of change and aspiration. The Gardens Trust series reflects the continuity and change in garden design and understanding through the twentieth century highlighting specific gardens and designers and setting them within more contextual discussions. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week. Tickets £30 or £5 each. To purchase a ticket for the complete series through Eventbrite, visit HERE. The Gardens Trust has complete details on its website.

    The March 16 talk with the excellent Catherine Horwood centers on Margery Fish. My personal favorite instructional quote from one of Ms. Fish’s books is “First, have your man dig a ditch.” I didn’t have the man to do such a thing, and it was an artifact of an age.

    For many years, Margery Fish fought a lonely battle to revive the popularity of the cottage garden style of planting in an age of close-mown striped lawns and beds of formal floribunda and Hybrid Tea roses. But was cottage garden planting ever a true horticultural style or rather a romantic, bucolic myth? In this talk, Dr Catherine Horwood will look at what constitutes this type of planting, where it originated from and how it links to other gardening styles. She will consider how Margery Fish was able to take it forward into becoming a national movement through her life story, and the legacy she left behind.

    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. She is currently working on a biography of Lady Dorothy Nevill.

  • Monday, March 13, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Plant Hunting and Plant Transfers: Economic Botany and Plant Exchange, Online

    The stories of the individual plant hunters who operated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century have often been told and told well. The aim of this online Gardens Trust series of lectures with Dr. Toby Musgrave, therefore, is to broaden the subject and to explore four complementary yet contrasting topics. It will also serve as an introduction to the whole topic of plant hunting, collecting and transfer round the world, which we are planning to cover in more depth in the autumn. The secon lecture on March 13 is Economic Botany and Plant Exchange. The series ticket costs £16 for the course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. To register through Eventbrite, and for more information, visit HERE, or visit The Gardens Trust events page, https://thegardenstrust.org/events-archive/?events=gardenstrust. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    It is well known that Sir Joseph Banks in his role as unofficial Director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew established a paradigm for botanical plant hunting on a global scale. This lecture offers a different economic perspective and examines plants as a vehicle for colonial expansion and exploitation; and it will bring the topic up to date with a discussion of contemporary issues including as genetic copyright and cultural and intellectual property.

  • Tuesday, March 14, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Garden Technology: A Glittering Tale – A History of the Glasshouse in Britain, Online

    This is the fourth lecture in a six-week series of lectures which will look at the history and development of garden technology from Medieval times right up to the present day. The ‘technology’ of gardening has developed enormously over the past centuries due to mechanization, automation, advances in science – and we can now grow plants without soil, we have automated watering systems for our greenhouses and we can watch while the robot mower, controlled from our smartphones, trims our lawns to perfection. But although we may approach them differently, the tasks and challenges that face gardeners today are much the same as they were back in Tudor times and earlier: preparing the soil, planting, protecting, composting, propagating and so on and so on. The rise in the organic movement over the past few decades has reminded us that the gardeners of old knew at least as much about gardening and working in harmony with nature as we do now, so how have new technologies developed and progressed our gardening knowledge, practice, and techniques?

    The Gardens Trust has engaged a series of expert speakers to examine this question, including the renowned garden writer and designer, Noel Kingsbury, National Trust curator James Rothwell, expert on lawnmowers through the ages Keith Wootton, as well as regular Gardens Trust lecturers Jill Francis and our very own David Marsh; who will take a different technology in turn – tools, fertilizers, pest control, glasshouses, lawnmowers and plant breeding – and explore their history and development in relation to gardening. Tickets £24 or £5 each. 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 (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    Since Roman times, people have longed to grow fruits and flowering plants from climates warmer than their own. It is from their resulting endeavors that the humble greenhouse of today emerged, bringing with it the ability to experience horticultural and culinary delights from across the globe. This talk on March 14 with James Rothwell will look at the history of the glasshouse in Britain, from the 17th-century orangery at Ham House to the 1920s greenhouse at Mr Straw’s House in Nottinghamshire. It will also look at the supporting acts that are garden sheds and at how innovations in glasshouse technology have informed building design today beyond the garden, including central heating systems, railway stations and even skyscrapers.

    James Rothwell studied architectural and landscape history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in the Red Books of Humphry Repton. He has been a curator with the National Trust for nearly thirty years. During that time, he has been responsible for a number of estates with important glasshouses, notably Quarry Bank in Cheshire where he oversaw the acquisition and restoration of the kitchen garden, including a range of glass with an early curvilinear iron showhouse.

  • Thursday, March 9, 10:00 am GMT (but recorded) – C20 Garden, Part 2: Beverley Nichols, Leading Us Down the Garden Path, Online

    Created and re-created against the backdrop of cycle of war and peace with its accompanying social and economic impacts, the twentieth century garden pivots between tradition and modernism, informality and structure. The century sees a shift in both style and materials as concrete takes its place at the heart of new towns and spaces, whilst the country house garden struggles to survive and flourish again in a new order. Garden design increasingly reflects the needs of a wider range of society, whilst literary and artistic movements locate gardens at the very heart of the struggle for meaning in a world of change and aspiration. The Gardens Trust series reflects the continuity and change in garden design and understanding through the twentieth century highlighting specific gardens and designers and setting them within more contextual discussions. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week. Tickets £30 or £5 each. To purchase a ticket for the complete series through Eventbrite, visit HERE. The Gardens Trust has complete details on its website.

    The March 9 talk with Twigs Way highlights one of my personal favorite garden authors, Beverley Nichols (1898-1983): Leading us Down the Garden Path. Beverley Nichols was an author, socialite, and garden creator, now perhaps best remembered for his books which were not quite about gardening and yet not-quite not about gardening. Inspired by his various houses and gardens, the events he shared and the people he portrayed (sometimes quite mercilessly) were also not quite true and yet not-quite not true. Although somewhat misogynistic in style, and resolutely off-hand on the subject of gardening instruction, his 1932 best-selling work Down the Garden Path, illustrated by Rex Whistler, has been in print almost continuously since it first appeared. It was followed by two other works about his time at ‘Allways’ (his pseudonym for Glatton, Cambridgeshire), before a move to Hampstead Heath and then on to a Georgian manor in Ashtead, Surrey resulted in more not-quite gardening books. Nichols gave rise to a particular genre of gardening memoir in the mid-twentieth century, not to mention several satires on the style including Garden Rubbish (1936). This talk will explore the life, loves and garden landscapes of Beverley Nichols, drawing on published and unpublished material. The speaker lives in the village adjacent to Nichols’ beloved ‘Allways’.

    Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs is fascinated by the past and intrigued by the role of flowers, gardens and landscape in art and culture of all kinds. Her talks and books reflect that endless curiosity with themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature . . and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. From gnomes in Neasden to hollyhocks from the Holy Land every plant has a tale to tell, every garden a past. 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.

  • Monday, March 6, 1:00 pm- 2:30 pm Eastern – Plant Hunting and Plant Transfers: The Early Passion for Plants, Online

    The stories of the individual plant hunters who operated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century have often been told and told well. The aim of this online Gardens Trust series of lectures with Dr. Toby Musgrave, therefore, is to broaden the subject and to explore four complementary yet contrasting topics. It will also serve as an introduction to the whole topic of plant hunting, collecting and transfer round the world, which we are planning to cover in more depth in the autumn. The first lecture on March 6 is The Early Passion for Plants. The series ticket costs £16 for the course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. To register through Eventbrite, and for more information, visit HERE, or visit The Gardens Trust events page, https://thegardenstrust.org/events-archive/?events=gardenstrust. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    With a time frame from Ancient Egypt to the seventeenth century the objective is to explore the passion for plants in the time before the great age of plant hunting. This fascination with flora will include the introduction of new garden plants but will also venture beyond the garden walls and examine associated subjects such as botany, medicine and nomenclature. Dr Toby Musgrave FSA FLS is a garden and plants historian, horticulturist and author. His books have covered a wide range of subjects from head gardeners to heritage fruit and vegetables, plant hunters to paradise gardens, and a biography of Sir Joseph Banks. He was a major contributor to Radio 4’s series “The British Garden” and he has been a consultant for many gardening and garden history related programmes on both the BBC and commercial television. He lives in Denmark and when not gardening, teaching or writing he works as a submersible pilot. Photo courtesy https://nilescribes.org/2021/05/01/ancient-egyptian-gardens/

  • Tuesday, March 7, 5:00 am – 6:30 am (but recorded) – Garden Technology: A History of Pest Control, Online

    This is the third lecture in a six-week series of lectures which will look at the history and development of garden technology from Medieval times right up to the present day. The ‘technology’ of gardening has developed enormously over the past centuries due to mechanization, automation, advances in science – and we can now grow plants without soil, we have automated watering systems for our greenhouses and we can watch while the robot mower, controlled from our smartphones, trims our lawns to perfection. But although we may approach them differently, the tasks and challenges that face gardeners today are much the same as they were back in Tudor times and earlier: preparing the soil, planting, protecting, composting, propagating and so on and so on. The rise in the organic movement over the past few decades has reminded us that the gardeners of old knew at least as much about gardening and working in harmony with nature as we do now, so how have new technologies developed and progressed our gardening knowledge, practice, and techniques?

    The Gardens Trust has engaged a series of expert speakers to examine this question, including the renowned garden writer and designer, Noel Kingsbury, National Trust curator James Rothwell, expert on lawnmowers through the ages Keith Wootton, as well as regular Gardens Trust lecturers Jill Francis and our very own David Marsh; who will take a different technology in turn – tools, fertilizers, pest control, glasshouses, lawnmowers and plant breeding – and explore their history and development in relation to gardening. Tickets £24 or £5 each. 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 (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    On March 7, enjoy Things ‘that noye Gardens’ – A History of Pest Control, with Jill Francis. Garden pests and diseases have been with us for as long as we have been making gardens. The first gardening text to be published in English promises to teach us how to dress, sow and set a garden, but at the same time, and equally importantly, offers remedies for ‘beasts, worms, flies and suchlike’ that are harmful to gardens. This talk will look at the many and various ways gardeners have sought to control them, from the downright superstitious, through practical remedies learned through observation and experience to the introduction of revolutionary chemical controls, which we may now wonder whether they have done more harm than good.

    Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specializing in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. She was awarded her PhD in 2011 by the University of Birmingham and has taught as a visiting lecturer at Birmingham and also the University of Worcester. She also has lectured in a variety of Garden History fora, including the Institute of Historical Research Landscape and Gardens seminar program and most recently, has become increasing involved in the Gardens Trust extensive online provision. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her first book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press in June 2018.

  • Thursday, March 2, 10:00 am GMT (but recorded) – The C20 Garden Part 2: A New Jerusalem, Online

    Created and re-created against the backdrop of cycle of war and peace with its accompanying social and economic impacts, the twentieth century garden pivots between tradition and modernism, informality and structure. The century sees a shift in both style and materials as concrete takes its place at the heart of new towns and spaces, whilst the country house garden struggles to survive and flourish again in a new order. Garden design increasingly reflects the needs of a wider range of society, whilst literary and artistic movements locate gardens at the very heart of the struggle for meaning in a world of change and aspiration. The Gardens Trust series reflects the continuity and change in garden design and understanding through the twentieth century highlighting specific gardens and designers and setting them within more contextual discussions. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week. Tickets £30 or £5 each. To purchase a ticket for the complete series through Eventbrite, visit HERE. The Gardens Trust has complete details on its website.

    The second lecture of the winter series is A New Jerusalem: from a Tonic to the Nation to New Towns, with Kate Harwood. As part of the New Jerusalem, Clement Attlee’s post-war government planned a series of ‘new towns of the future with blocks of flats, American-style highways and flyovers and a strict separation of the new city into different zones for housing. leisure and industry’. As Maxwell Fry declared ‘The new Britain must be Planned’. But where were the landscape architects and garden designers in all this? The contributions of these professionals, first intimated in the Festival of Britain of 1951, and the influences they absorbed from the United States and Europe will be considered in this talk – which is very much a work in progress!

    Kate Harwood is a garden historian involved with planning and conservation , especially for Hertfordshire Gardens Trust. Hertfordshire is an area which has been blessed with many of the New Towns and the work of designers such as Jellicoe, Patterson, and just over the border in Essex, Gibberd. She has taught and lectured on garden history for some years.

  • Monday, February 27, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – The Duchess of Beaufort’s Florilegium, Online

    The florilegium was commissioned by Mary Somerset, the first Duchess of Beaufort between 1703 and 1707. Mary Beaufort was a passionate gardener and her gardens at Badminton and Beaufort House, London, were recorded in several well-known views published in Knyff and Kip’s Britannia Illustrata. Interested in plants and gardens from an early age, after her second marriage to Henry Somerset, first Duke of Beaufort, in 1657, she oversaw the planting of the extensive gardens seen in Knyff and Kip’s engraved views. But it was after her husband died when the Duchess was in her seventies, that she threw herself even more fully into the collecting and rearing of plants from all over the world.

    In order to record permanently her horticultural successes, the duchess commissioned a florilegium from a Dutch artist, Everhard Kick, who had previously worked for her friend, Sir Hans Sloane in London. Kick, whose work was continued by Daniel Frankcom, a member of the duchess’s household, developed an idiosyncratic style in which he showed the roots of plants growing beneath the ground. The online Gardens Trust talk on February 27 at 2 pm Eastern will discuss Mary Beaufort as a gardener and highlight some of the contents of her remarkable flower book. 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.

  • Thursday, February 23, 10:00 am GMT (but recorded) – The C20 Garden Part 2: Decline, Fall, and Rise – The Country House and its Garden Between the Wars and After, Online

    Created and re-created against the backdrop of cycle of war and peace with its accompanying social and economic impacts, the twentieth century garden pivots between tradition and modernism, informality and structure. The century sees a shift in both style and materials as concrete takes its place at the heart of new towns and spaces, whilst the country house garden struggles to survive and flourish again in a new order. Garden design increasingly reflects the needs of a wider range of society, whilst literary and artistic movements locate gardens at the very heart of the struggle for meaning in a world of change and aspiration. The Gardens Trust series reflects the continuity and change in garden design and understanding through the twentieth century highlighting specific gardens and designers and setting them within more contextual discussions. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week. Tickets £30 or £5 each. To purchase a ticket for the complete series through Eventbrite, visit HERE. The Gardens Trust has complete details on its website.

    The first lecture on February 23 is Decline, Fall, and Rise – The Country House and its Garden Between the Wars and After, with Ben Cowell. Country houses and gardens faced significant pressures in the early 20th century. Rising costs, diminishing incomes and the impact of war meant that by the early 1950s country houses were disappearing from the landscape at an unprecedented rate, as owners took the decision to cut their losses and recoup the value of their assets. This could leave gardens as the only surviving relics of vanished mansion properties, and these gardens too frequently fell into disarray given the shrinkage in the number of employed gardening staff. Yet the 1950s and 60s also saw a recovery in the fortunes of some estates, as a result of the post-War boom in leisure and tourism. This talk considers the fate of country houses and their gardens, and the efforts that were taken to bring them back to life in the second half of the 20th century.

    Ben Cowell is the Director General of Historic Houses, which represents 1,500 independently owned country houses and gardens across the UK and has nearly 70,000 general members. Ben previously worked for the National Trust and English Heritage. His PhD at the University of Nottingham was on the social and economic history of estate landscapes in the 18th and 19th centuries. His published books include a history of the heritage movement: The Heritage Obsession (The History Press, 2008), and works on different aspects of landscape history: Uvedale Price; Decoding the Picturesque (with Charles Watkins, The Boydell Press, 2012), and Landscapes of the National Trust (with Stephen Daniels and Lucy Veale, Pavilion Books, 2015). Ben was awarded an OBE for services to cultural heritage in the 2021 New Year Honours list.

    Easton Lodge, Norfolk

  • Wednesday, February 22, 1:30 pm Eastern – Unforgettable Gardens – Ireland: Glenveagh Castle, Online

    The Gardens Trust presents a series of 4 online talks on some of the well- and lesser known historic gardens of Ireland Wednesdays from 1 Feb £5 each or £16 for all. Register through Eventbrite HERE., or visit https://thegardenstrust.org for more details. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards. This February 22 talk is the last of the series, on Glenveagh Castle with Seán Ó Gaoithín.

    Glenveagh Castle Gardens are part of Glenveagh National Park in the northwest of County Donegal. The site occupied by the castle and gardens was formerly wild mountain moorland, with construction of the castle beginning in 1869 and the gardens in the mid-1880s. The two major elements of the garden, the Pleasure Gardens and the Walled Garden, were built in the late 1880s. The gardens, which were constructed for Cornelia Adair, still retain their original Victorian layout.

    From the late 1950s through to the early 1980s, the design and layout of the garden were developed to include the Gothic Orangery, the Italian Terrace, the Tuscan Garden and the development of the plant collection. Today, Glenveagh is well known for its rich collection of trees and shrubs specializing in southern hemisphere species and a diverse rhododendron collection.

    Seán Ó Gaoithín was born and raised in Dublin, educated at The National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Chelsea Physic Garden (London), Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (UK), and holds an MScArg from University College Dublin. He has been serving as Head Gardener at Glenveagh Castle Gardens, Glenveagh National Park since 1995. Aside from his training Sean has written for Horticultural Journals on Glenveagh and on his extensive travels to study the temperate flora of the Planet. He has represented Glenveagh at International Botanic Garden conferences speaking on subjects such as the Historic Development of the Castle Gardens at Glenveagh and the history and management of The Ancient Woodlands of Glenveagh National Park.