Boston Flora

Tag: Gardens Trust

  • Wednesday, January 8, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Picturing a New World: The Photographs of Susan Jellicoe

    In January, join Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading for the beginning of an online series of talks in partnership with the Gardens Trust, on six women – Susan Jellicoe, Sheila Haywood, Brenda Colvin, Mary Mitchell, Marjory Allen and Marian Thompson – who all contributed to the expertise, development and awareness of the landscape profession and in so many different ways. A ticket is for the series of 6 talks at £42 or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8. (Gardens Trust and FOLAR members £6 each or all 6 for £31.50). There will be an opportunity for Q & A after each session. Please note that the 6th and final talk in this series is on 30th April. Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards. For tickets visit www.eventbriteco.uk

    Join us in this online series to hear from these special speakers – Sally Ingram, Paula Laycock, Hal Moggridge, Joy Burgess, Wendy Titman and Bruce Thompson – who have each known, worked with, or researched one of these six remarkable women. On January 8, the first lecture will be on The Photographs of Susan Jellicoe.

    Susan Pares Jellicoe (1907-1986) joined the office of Jellicoe, Page and Wilson as a secretary in 1936 and went on to become a highly regarded honorary member of the Institute of Landscape Architects, collaborating with Geoffrey Jellicoe in all aspects of his work. When the International Federation of Landscape Architects was formed after the war, Susan Jellicoe’s skills as a linguist, and her wartime experiences, were instrumental in promoting international understanding between nations. The work of Geoffrey Jellicoe has overshadowed Susan’s contribution to the study of twentieth century landscape design, and yet she was an accomplished plantswoman, writer, editor, and a skilled self-taught photographer.

    Drawing on Susan Jellicoe’s collection of thousands of small black and white photographs, taken during the 1950s and 60s and pasted on sheets of brown paper, this talk will consider her extensive journey with a camera, capturing the post war landscape. Sylvia Crowe commented of the time ‘we all thought we could make a new world’ and this unique archive creates a visual narrative of the mid twentieth century, filtered through the preoccupations of a distinctly modern eye.

    After a career in education Sally Ingram completed an MA in Garden History at Birkbeck, University of London, and has continued to research aspects of garden history for a number of projects. Her particular interest is in the twentieth century landscape and her MA dissertation considered the design of memorial parks and gardens in the post war era. She studied the work of Geoffrey Jellicoe when investigating his design for the roof garden at Harvey’s department store in Guildford and discovered Susan Jellicoe’s photograph albums, in the archive at the Landscape Institute. She has continued to explore this fascinating collection of over 6,000 images – now at MERL – and its significance in the history of the post war urban landscape.

  • Wednesday, December 11, 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm Eastern – Queen Caroline and the Invention of the Landscape Garden

    Join The Gardens Trust in partnership with Kent Gardens Trust on December 11 for a special online lecture. Conventional ideas of the invention of the landscape garden in 1730s England attribute the creation of this new form of naturalistic garden design to male gardeners (William Kent, Charles Bridgeman) and/or landowners (the Earl of Carlisle, the Prince of Wales, Lord Cobham, General Dormer, etc.).

    This talk will consider the activities of Caroline of Ansbach, Queen Caroline 1727-37 (wife of George II), and debates within her intellectual circle. The focus will be on underlying religio-scientific concepts crucial to developing views of the natural world that were taking place in Caroline’s lifetime (1683-1737). Such views were a pre-condition of the new form of garden that took shape in the 1730s. We will also focus on the intellectual ramifications of her transition from Ansbach to England, as Princess of Wales, in 1714. For particular reasons she was responsible for the design of a garden building that the talk will represent as seminal to the landscape garden.

    The gardens involved are those at Richmond, Kensington Palace, and Stowe.

    Michael Charlesworth gained his PhD in History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is currently a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin teaching 19th century European painting and photography. He has written the first full length biography of Reginald Farrer, a critical life of Derek Jarman, as well as major articles on early photography, the picturesque, and 18th century panoramic drawing. His book Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Routledge) was published in 2008

    This ticket is for this special session and costs £8. Gardens Trust and Kent Gardens Trust Members may purchase tickets at £6, through the Eventbrite link 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 2 weeks .


  • Tuesday, December 3, 4:00 am – 5:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Humphry Repton: From Picturesque Provocateur to Regency Ornamentalist, Online

    The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.

    This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.

    As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.

    Humphry Repton (1752–1818) initially styled himself Capability Brown’s successor: the next great improver of landed property. This was a bold and ambitious stance, which opened him up to persecution from the new school of Picturesque aesthetes. These men championed a Romantic appreciation for rugged and sublime topography, and a disdain for the manicured lawns of Brown and his contemporaries which had come before.

    Ultimately forced to develop an entirely new aesthetic, Repton’s later designs were crowded with terraces, trellises, bowers, bowling greens and gravel walks. He called this new style ‘Ornamental Gardening’. Immortalized by Jane Austen in her novel Mansfield Park, Repton’s ingenious Red Books, with their ‘before and after’ overlays, helped nurture an appreciation for landscape amongst his Regency clients. This lecture traces Repton’s career from his early entanglement with the Picturesque writers, to the progressive ornamental style of the turn of a new century.

    Dr. Laura Mayer will lecture on December 3 for The Gardens Trust. Register HERE

  • Tuesday, November 26, 4:00 am – 5:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Chinoiserie: Tea, Trade Routes, and a Taste for the Exotic, Online

    The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.

    This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.

    As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.

    The fourth lecture in this Gardens Trust series brings back Dr Laura Mayer on November 26. Chinoiserie – an early European interest in the arts, architecture and gardening of the Far East – blossomed in Georgian Britain, coinciding with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and modern consumerist society. Soon, every landscape park and public pleasure ground in the country had a Chinese pagoda, bridge, barge or brightly painted tea-house in which to drink tea, that most fashionable of imported luxuries.

    This lecture will examine the politics and trade routes of eighteenth-century Britain, as well as the growing craze for informal gardening. This had been gaining traction since 1685 when William Temple published his appraisal of East Asian garden asymmetry, without ever having traveled to China. The talk will consider the authenticity of British Chinoiserie, and reveal what, if anything, the landscape style owes to Asia’s early gardens. In short, just how English was the English landscape garden after all? Image: The Chinese House at Shugborough, Staffordshire, photo c.2009 © Laura Mayer. Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-history-of-gardens-3-tickets-1011314337407

  • Tuesday, November 19, 4:00 am – 5:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Lancelot Brown: Assessing the ‘Capabilities’

    The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.

    This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.

    As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.

    The third lecture takes place November 19 with Dr. Laura Mayer. The architect and designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, born in 1716, is credited with formulating the iconic English landscape garden. Even today, his rolling lawns, scattered with tree clumps and ornamented with glittering lakes, continue to define our perception of rural Britain. As a result, his hundreds of landscapes have eclipsed the study of eighteenth-century garden history almost entirely.

    Both a visionary and a practical plantsman, the scale of Brown’s work is truly extraordinary. However, no designer works within a cultural vacuum, leading us to question just how many of his landscape schemes can be attributed solely to him. And when we look at the man behind the name, what, in fact, was Brown’s greatest ‘capability’? This lecture considers that it was not just his aesthetic insight – nor even his practical gardening talents – that set Brown apart from his peers, but arguably something entirely more mercenary.

    Dr Laura Mayer is an independent lecturer, writer and researcher, with an MA in Garden History and a PhD in eighteenth-century patronage. Originally an art historian with a side of Spanish, she accidentally fell into garden history whilst working at the Alhambra in Granada. Laura has published extensively – particularly on Lancelot Brown and Humphry Repton – as well as on the historic gardens of Cambridgeshire. She lectures regularly for Cambridge University Botanic Gardens and works as a conservation consultant for the National Trust and Land & Heritage. Laura lives in Bristol, in a lilac-and-blue Georgian house with a tiny garden overlooking Repton’s Ashton Court estate.

    Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-history-of-gardens-3-tickets-1011314337407

    Image: The Brownian landscape at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, photo © Jill Sinclair

  • Tuesday, November 12, 4:00 am – 5:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Poetry and Prose, Online

    The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.

    This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.

    As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.

    The second talk of the Gardens Trust series takes place November 12 with Judith Hawley. Gardens are composed of earth, air, water and living things but they are sometimes composed by writers; this is particularly the case in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope fostered the adoption of classical ideals of gardening derived from the writings of Homer, Virgil, Cicero and Horace. The gardens at Stowe, Stourhead, Cirencester and Rousham Park as well as Pope’s more modest garden in Twickenham attempt to embody classical ideals of arcadian simplicity, virtuous self-sufficiency and temporary retirement from the busy world. The influences were not only classical: eighteenth-century gardens proudly foregrounded British traditions in the form of Druidical and Gothic elements. Literature also features in the placing of quotations around gardens. As well as considering famous and great gardens, Judith will also briefly touch on some of the more eccentric ones such as those created by William Stukeley, Jonathan Tyers and Francis Dashwood.

    Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published and broadcast on a range of eighteenth-century literary and cultural topics. As Trustee of the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust and The London Luminaries she is involved in bringing the heritage of West London to a wider audience. For ticket information visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-history-of-gardens-3-tickets-1011314337407. Image below: Nathaniel Parr, after Pieter Andreas Rysbrack, An Exact Draught and View of Mr Pope’s House at Twickenham (1735), © London Borough of Richmond upon Thames Art Collection

  • Tuesday, November 5, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – 18th Century Gardens: Early Landscape Gardens, Online

    The Georgian era is often seen as the pinnacle of garden design in England, as the formal, baroque style of the late 17th century gave way to the looser, more naturalistic designs of what became known as the English Landscape Movement. It was a style that spread around the world.

    This Gardens Trust online series will trace the development of the landscape style, beginning with early examples full of decorative garden buildings and classical allusions, and then the impact of England’s most famous landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who laid out vast parklands with rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and clumps of trees. As we’ll see, the century ended with a clash between the wild, rugged aesthetic of the Picturesque and the start of a return to formality and ornamentation in garden-making.

    As well as examining individual gardens and designers, we will explore some of the myriad social and economic influences at work on Georgian design. These included political upheaval, changing land use, foreign trade and the lure of exoticism, alongside the impact of the European ‘Grand Tour’ undertaken by wealthy men, which instilled an admiration for classical art and poetry, and for French and Italian landscape painting.

    The first of the series of five lectures begins Tuesday, November 5 with Oliver Cox. Often presented as a dramatic shift, the change from baroque designs to the landscape style, in reality, happened gradually over many years. Early glimpses of irregular layouts and whimsical features started to appear alongside the blurring of boundaries between gardens and the wider rural landscape. With wars in Europe and shifting political values at home, there was perhaps a desire for a less grandiose, more patriotic garden style, and so stiff baroque geometry slowly softened into gentler glades, serpentine lakes, irregularly placed garden buildings and allusions to classical and British myths and legends. Designers such as Charles Bridgeman and William Kent (who memorably ‘leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden’) were among the leading figures in the emerging naturalistic style.

    Many significant 18th-century gardens – Chiswick House, Rousham, Castle Howard, Studley Royal, Stowe and Stourhead – remain today as well-loved visitor attractions, and their stories have much to tell us about the values, influences and aesthetics of the early landscape garden-makers.

    Dr Oliver Cox is a historian by training and received his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. His recent publications include contributions to The Country House: Past, Present and Future (Rizzoli International Publications, 2018); Sport and Leisure in the Irish and British Country House (Four Courts Press, 2019), and journal articles including the challenges of interpreting eighteenth-century spaces for twenty-first-century visitors. He also writes regularly for Apollo and is a frequent contributor to television and radio programs. Currently, he is Head of Academic Partnerships at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

    This ticket link is for the third series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links found at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-history-of-gardens-3-tickets-1011314337407. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25).

    Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards. Image below: Coplestone Warre Bampfylde, The Grotto, Stourhead, 1753. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

  • Wednesday, October 30, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Marcell Proust and the Gardens of the Belle Epoque, Online

    Through an exploration of drama, diaries, novels and magazines, this Gardens Trust Wednesday five part series will examine how writers have used gardens and plants to evoke memories, capture ideas of taste and fashion, satirize attitudes, champion social change and give deeper meaning to the world. The chosen authors cover almost four centuries of literature and, through examining their words, we can gain new understandings of the roles, meanings and emotive power of historic landscapes and horticulture. This ticket link https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gardens-and-the-written-word-tickets-930348275737 is for the entire series of 5 talks, or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links on that page. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25). All purchases are handled through Eventbrite.

    Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 1 week afterwards. Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk. 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 weeks.

    On October 30, Ben Dark will speak on Marcell Proust. Real and remembered gardens weave through the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. This talk will shake some of them loose, blossom hopefully intact, and examine what makes Proust the greatest ever writer on plants and the feelings they evoke.

    In doing so we will explore the Pré Catelan Garden in Illiers (Proust’s Combray), the Bois de Boulogne, the hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the seaside villas of the Côte Fleurie, examining how their unique treatments provide a window on changing attitudes to garden space in nineteenth and early twentieth century France. We’ll finish with a guide to planting your own Proustian Garden — one capable of provoking involuntary memories in visitors’ decades after they once called round for tea.

    Ben Dark is an author, head gardener, broadcaster and landscape historian. He studied Horticulture at Capel Manor, before completing a traineeship at the Garden Museum and an MA in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research. As a gardener he has worked for embassies, cemeteries, heritage bodies and oligarchs. He hosts the award-winning Garden Log and Dear Gardener podcasts, while his book The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens (Mitchell Beazley, 2022) contains stories of life, death, love and flowers told by the plants of a single street. In 2022 he won the Journalist of the Year award from the Garden Media Guild. Image below: Le Déjeuner (1873), Claude Monet, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

  • Tuesdays, October 15 – 29, 5:00 am – 6:30 pm Eastern (but recorded) – Unforgettable Gardens Book Launch, Online

    Celebrate the launch of The Gardens Trust book on Unforgettable Gardens with online talks from three of its contributors. Ticketholders will receive a code for a 30% discount on pre-orders of the book from Batsford, the publishers.

    Unforgettable Gardens explores the history of British garden design through some of the most beautiful, intriguing, unusual and important gardens, parks and landscapes in the UK, with stunning photography accompanied by insightful profiles from leading garden historians and conservators.

    Arranged chronologically, Unforgettable Gardens covers over 50 individual gardens, most of which are open to the public, which have been carefully selected to give an overview of British garden design from the 16th to the 20th century. Each century opens with an illuminating essay, exploring the wider changes in social context, taste and style in each period.

    Curated by the Gardens Trust, the UK conservation charity dedicated to protecting, researching and celebrating historic gardens, this book is intended to inform, inspire and encourage everyone to enjoy, visit and support our national heritage of parks and gardens.

    This ticket is for the entire series of 3 talks, or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links below. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 3 for £15.75).

    Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards. 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 2 weeks.

    Week 1. 15th October: the Bobarts and Oxford Botanic Garden with India Cole. First in a series of 3 online lectures, £8 each or all 3 for £21 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 3 for £15.75) Jacob Bobart the Elder (c.1599-1680) was the first keeper of the Oxford Physic Garden (as the Botanic Garden was originally known). Bobart’s early life is shrouded in mystery, and he is best remembered now for his supposed eccentricity, but he deserves recognition for establishing the garden’s original (impressive) plant collection with limited resources. His son, Jacob Bobart the Younger (1641-1719) later became the second superintendent of the garden and was crucial in its development and on-going success. Bobart the Elder’s other son, Tilleman (?-1735), gained a position working as a gardener at Blenheim Palace and then Hampton Court. This talk will give an overview of the Bobarts and their contributions to botany and horticulture, as well as considering how mercantile and commercial interests informed, influenced, and aligned with their pursuits of gardening and botany in the early-modern period.

    Week 2. 22nd October: Margery Fish and East Lambrook Manor with Catherine Horwood. Second in a series of 3 online lectures, £8 each or all 3 for £21 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 3 for £15.75) In 1980, John Sales, then Head of Gardens for the National Trust said of East Lambrook Manor, in Somerset, that ‘in the development of gardening in the second half of the twentieth century, no garden has yet had greater effect.’ This effect was to create a passion in Britain for ‘cottage garden’ planting brought to prominence through the enthusiasm and hard work of its creator, Margery Fish.

    In this talk, Dr Catherine Horwood will look at how Margery Fish was able to take cottage gardening forward into becoming a national movement by telling her life story, and the legacy she left behind. As well as describing Fish’s work at East Lambrook Manor, she will reveal how her books, starting with We Made A Garden published in 1956, show Fish’s knowledge of plant material having amassed over 2,000 different species and cultivars from a network of horticultural friendships and wayside finds.

    Week 3. 29th October: Castle Howard with Sally Jeffery. Last in a series of 3 online lectures, £8 each or all 3 for £21 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 3 for £15.75) The dramatic and varied landscape at Castle Howard was designed in the early eighteenth century by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor with the active participation of the owner, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, and is among the most memorable and innovative ever created. As Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Nobody had informed me that at one view I should see a palace, a town, a fortified city, temples on high places, woods worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids, the noblest lawns in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive…’. Its main lines survive today, and its history can be further illuminated by surviving drawings and documents.

  • Wednesday, October 16, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Gardens and the Written Word: Jane Loudon: Author, Editor, Influencer

    Through an exploration of drama, diaries, novels and magazines, this Gardens Trust Wednesday five part series will examine how writers have used gardens and plants to evoke memories, capture ideas of taste and fashion, satirize attitudes, champion social change and give deeper meaning to the world. The chosen authors cover almost four centuries of literature and, through examining their words, we can gain new understandings of the roles, meanings and emotive power of historic landscapes and horticulture. This ticket link https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gardens-and-the-written-word-tickets-930348275737 is for the entire series of 5 talks, or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links on that page. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25). All purchases are handled through Eventbrite.

    Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 1 week afterwards. Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk. 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 weeks.

    Week Three is on Wednesday, October 16 at 1 pm Eastern. The career of Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is all too often overshadowed by that of her husband John Claudius Loudon, leaving the impression that she did indeed owe him ’all the knowledge of the subject she possesses’. By examining some of her key publications including Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840), The Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening and The Lady’s Country Companion (1845) we can better understand her legacy as knowledgeable botanist, best-selling gardening writer and ground-breaking magazine editor including the role she played in influencing, championing and challenging women’s roles within the garden, the home and wider society.

    Dr Rachel Savage’s interest in garden history started over fifteen years ago whilst working as Head of Marketing for the RHS. Since then she has completed qualifications in horticulture, garden design, an MA in Landscape History at UEA and a PhD exploring house and garden design and the gendering of space in the nineteenth century. A trustee for the Gardens Trust, she has also contributed to Norfolk Garden Trust’s publications on Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.