In the seventeenth century Oxfordshire was home to two remarkable gardens that shared a reliance on technology to indulge the enthusiasms of their owners and impress their visitors. The Enstone Marvels are well known, and recent archaeological research has been able to document some extraordinary survivals. The great gardens at Hanwell were the site of a community termed the New Atlantis and excavations there have uncovered remains of a ‘House of Diversion’ together with a unique assemblage of terracotta gardens urns from the period.

This April 13 talk beginning at 5 pm Eastern is part of the Garden Trust’s online series exploring archaeology with a 17th century bias. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £20 via the link here.

Stephen Wass is a researcher, about to complete his D. Phil. on the subject of seventeenth-century water gardens. In addition, he works as a commercial archaeologist. In this capacity most of his projects involve historic gardens and he is currently occupied with a series of archaeological investigations connected with the latest programme of restoration at Stowe Landscape Gardens near Buckingham. He is also working to set up a new research programme alongside the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust into the ‘lost’ Tudor and Jacobean gardens in the county.