Boston Flora

Tag: Gardens Trust

  • 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.

  • Tuesday, October 8, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – A History of Gardens 2: The Baroque in England, Online

    What is a garden? Why were they created as they were? What influences were at play in garden making, and how have gardens evolved and developed over time? These are the questions we will explore as we traverse the history of gardens through the ages.

    Following on from our opening talks on early gardens, this second series will examine how gardens developed during the 17th century. We will explore how exotic plants from around the world started to appear in European gardens, and were captured in botanical art, before the tumultuous impact of the English civil wars on gardens and gardening from the 1640s. The second part of the century saw the rise of extravagant, dramatic styles, now known as baroque gardens and exemplified by the work of André Le Nôtre for the Sun King at Versailles. We will explore these gardens through an analysis of the work of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries in France, and the series will end with a talk scrutinizing how the European baroque style played out in England.

    This ticket – purchase through Eventbrite HERE – is for this individual talk and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire [second] series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 via the link here. (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.

    After the civil war Charles and many of his court circle went into exile in Europe where they saw the glories of French and Dutch gardens. They fell in love with their ornate geometric formal layout, and on their return at the Restoration tried to recreate the grandeur of the European baroque in British gardens. At the same time the foundation of the Royal Society encouraged the development of botany as a new science while the financial revolution of the late 17th century spread an interest in gardening into the ranks of the new ‘middling sort’ and led to a thriving horticultural scene to serve them.

    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 is 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 on-line lecture programme and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.

  • Wednesday, October 9, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Gardens and the Written Word: Travel Writing and Garden Visiting

    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 Two of the series, on October 9, is Gardens and the Written Word: Travel Writing and Garden Visiting with Louise Crawley. The pastime of domestic travel for pleasure which swept through England’s ‘polite’ society in the long eighteenth century (c.1700 – c.1820) left a remarkable legacy of ‘amateur’ travel writing. Domestic tourists left detailed accounts of their thoughts and perceptions on country houses and designed landscapes, wider landscape scenes, and towns and cities, as they sought in-person experiences through which to demonstrate their grasp of taste and culture. This talk will explore the phenomenon of garden visiting and landscape appreciation as documented in the travel writing produced by tourists of the period. It will consider the experiences of travelers, how they perceived and interacted with landscapes and recorded their thoughts. It will also consider the concept of a specific descriptive ‘language’ of landscape, shared and understood by ‘polite’ people, and the value of travel writing for our understandings of historic gardens and landscapes today.

    Louise Crawley is a postgraduate researcher in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia, specializing in eighteenth-century travel writing accounts of the British landscape. Recently, Louise has worked as landscape advisor and historian for English Heritage, and as a freelance consultant specializing in landscape conservation and restoration plans. This talk is based on research undertaken as part of her doctoral thesis examining the concept of a wider codified vocabulary of descriptive terms used to describe specific landscape forms and to communicate ‘taste’ in the eighteenth century. The image below shows the fictional Doctor Syntax sketching a lake in his tour diary, a satirical swipe at travellers created by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson (1813).


  • Tuesday, October 1, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – A History of Gardens 2 – The French Baroque Garden, Online

    What is a garden? Why were they created as they were? What influences were at play in garden making, and how have gardens evolved and developed over time? These are the questions we will explore as we traverse the history of gardens through the ages.

    Following on from our opening talks on early gardens, this second series will examine how gardens developed during the 17th century. We will explore how exotic plants from around the world started to appear in European gardens, and were captured in botanical art, before the tumultuous impact of the English civil wars on gardens and gardening from the 1640s. The second part of the century saw the rise of extravagant, dramatic styles, now known as baroque gardens and exemplified by the work of André Le Nôtre for the Sun King at Versailles. We will explore these gardens through an analysis of the work of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries in France, and the series will end with a talk scrutinizing how the European baroque style played out in England.

    This ticket – purchase through Eventbrite HERE – is for this individual talk and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire [second] series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 via the link here. (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.

    Visiting André Le Nôtre’s masterpieces, Chantilly, Vaux, Saint-Cloud, Sceaux, Versailles, the Grand Trianon, we encounter a series of static images, born out of the head of a ‘humble’ polymath for the greater glory of a megalomaniacal master. The myth of the sudden invention of the Louis XIV Grand Manner was carefully cultivated even at the time, but the roots of the Le Nôtrean taste stretched back to previous reigns, and designers. But what was the purpose of these linear perspectives and expanses of gravel? Of what were they made? How were they built and maintained?

    This talk examines the construction and formal vocabulary of these compositions, but also their antecedents in garden and military architecture, and their usages and significance in the social and political practices of the court. The last part of the talk considers the afterlife of the idiom, its evolution under Louis XV and Louis XVI, its neglect and destruction in the 19th century, and its rehabilitation in the Belle Époque.

    Dr Gabriel Wick is a landscape historian and curator. He teaches history of architecture and urbanism at the Paris campus of New York University and also lectures for the École du Louvre. He received his master’s in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley, a master’s of historic landscape conservation from ÉNSA-Versailles, and a doctorate in history from Queen Mary – University of London. His most recent book Gardens in Revolution: landscapes and political culture in France, 1760–1792 will be published in autumn 2024.

  • Wednesday, September 25, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Restoration in Action: Northants: Burghley Walled Garden, Online

    This September 25 Zoom is an illustrated talk presented by the Gardens Trust in partnership with Northamptonshire Gardens Trust, part of our Restoration in Action series. Here the Head Gardener will be discussing the gardens’ extensive history, and an outline of the plans for bringing them back to life.

    The Restoration in Action series helps us to learn about researching, reporting and restoring a selection of glorious parks and gardens in the county. The chosen projects showcase the skills, sensitivities and determination needed to document and conserve historic sites. Burghley House, near Stamford in Lincolnshire, is one of the most impressive surviving mansions from the 16th century, built by William Cecil, Lord High Chancellor, in honor of Queen Elizabeth 1. George London and Moses Cook laid out elaborate formal gardens in the late 17th century and then, from the 1750s, the estate was transformed as one of Capability Brown’s biggest and most important commissions.

    Built over 300 years ago, the walled gardens at Burghley are substantial, encompassing 6.5 acres (2.5 hectares) inside 10-foot (3m) tall walls. They are an impressive site even now, years after the gardens fell silent and the last spade turned its final sod of soil.

    Today, the gardens are stirring, and plans are afoot to breathe life back into this amazing place, where 26 glass houses once stood and 120 gardeners labored behind those tall walls. Born in Worcester, lecturer Joe Whitehead grew up in the Bristol area and would spend his childhood summers at the estate where his grandfather worked who (like his father before him) was a head gardener, so not surprisingly he followed in their footsteps and, with a passion for plants and gardening, Joe pursued a career in horticulture.

    Joe’s first positions were as an undergardener at Hollywell Hall, Lincolnshire, and then Burghley House, somewhere he would unexpectedly return. He studied for a National Diploma in Horticulture and then the prestigious Wisley Diploma in Practical Horticulture, training and working in the RHS gardens for two years. Joe also holds the RHS Diploma levels 2 and 3. After Wisley, head gardener roles at Salle Park and Raveningham Hall, both in Norfolk, and a period running his own business, led him back to Burghley House, where as head gardener he has been managing the 46 acres of gardens for 6 years.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £8. Gardens Trust and Northamptonshire Gardens Trust Members may purchase tickets at £6. 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 will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks .