Boston Flora

Tag: Patrick Eyres

  • Tuesday, May 20, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Avant Gardening in the Twilight of a Millennium, Online

    The Gardens Trust’s final series of A History of Gardens will consider developments of the recent past. Starting with the arrival of the sleek, functional style of Modernism after the first world war, the talks will move on to explore contemporary thinking on the challenges of conserving and restoring historic parks and gardens, the rise of ecological perennial planting, the reappearance of allusive gardens and how a garden’s ‘spirit of place’ can guide sustainable plans for the future.

    Themes and exemplars in garden-making are more difficult to identify without the benefit of distance and time. But considering recent ideas and approaches is bound to bring a thought-provoking end to our History of Gardens. This ticket link is for the sixth 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 on the website. (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. 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 2 weeks.

    Talk 4 on May 20 is Avant Gardening in the Twilight of a Millennium, with Patrick Eyres. Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) coined the term Avant-Gardening, to evoke the process of synthesising art and horticulture at Little Sparta. In the centenary of Finlay’s birth, Little Sparta will be the focus. The allusion and association of Avant-Gardening provides common ground with four other contemporary gardens. Fragility is a parallel theme. Little Sparta (Ian and Sue Finlay), The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Charles and Maggie Jencks) and Prospect Cottage (Derek Jarman) have survived the death of their creators; the Garden of History (Jim Pierce) and the Driftwood Garden (Brian Yale) have not.

    Dr Patrick Eyres is editor and publisher of the unique New Arcadian Journal, in which artists and writers explore the landscape garden. The 56th and penultimate edition is underway. He has also published in numerous other books and journals and taught in the School of Art and Design at Bradford Collage. He served on the boards of the Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust, Leeds Art Fund, Garden History Society and Little Sparta Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for the first ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History. He continues to advise on the conservation of Little Sparta.

  • Wednesday, March 1, 1:00 pm – From Naumachia to Naval Warfare: Nautical Frolics in British Parks, Online

    “Look Out Behind You!!” The audience shouts out warnings to the ‘actors’ in the aquatic and pyrotechnic panto that is performed three afternoons a week each summer in Peasholm Park, Scarborough. The excitements of ‘Naval Warfare’ are unique. It is the last of the Naumachia, or mock naval battles, that have been ‘fought’ on the lakes of European gardens and parks since the Renaissance. Naumachia is the Romanised Greek word that described gladiatorial sea fights in the flooded Colosseum. When revived in the Renaissance, they became frolicsome pageants. For Georgian Britons, they combined ‘messing about in boats’ with re-enactment of the latest naval victory. Manned miniature warships, fortlets and docks adorned parkland lakes. Victorians paid to attend these spectacles. The March 1 Yorkshire Gardens Trust lecture will romp its way through these frolics to highlight the cultural significance of Scarborough’s ‘Naval Warfare’, which was launched in 1927 in Britain’s only public park designed exclusively in the Japanese style.

    Dr Patrick Eyres has, since 1981, created 54 editions of the unique, artist-illustrated New Arcadian Journal, which engages with the cultural politics of designed landscapes. Naumachia (1995) is a history of Peasholm Park, Naval Warfare and the Naumachia tradition. He has published extensively, most recently on the poetic gardening of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Penny Florence (ed.), Thinking The Sculpture Garden: Art, Plant, Landscape (2020), and in the 40th anniversary edition of the New Arcadian Journal, Atlantic Flowers: The Naval Memorials of Little Sparta (2022), as well as in the 50th anniversary issue of Garden History (2022). For many years he served on the boards of the Little Sparta Trust, Garden History Society, Leeds Art Fund, and Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History.

    In this first of a series of talks the speakers will introduce a variety of landscapes, gardens and themes enjoyed by Yorkshire Gardens Trust members which portray the wide diversity of designed landscapes in the 3 Yorkshire counties and the interests of the membership. £5 each or all 5 for £20. Register HERE.

  • Monday, April 26, 1:00 pm – 12:30 pm – Other Voices in Garden History: Learning from the Blackamoor, Online

    This series of Gardens Trust illustrated lectures will explore the impact and legacy of empire, colonialism and enslavement on western garden and landscape history. Our aim is to bring back some of the voices usually absent from this history, to identify and fill gaps in our collective knowledge, and to explore new ways of engaging with the whole history of gardens, landscapes and horticulture.

    The diverse range of topics and speakers will offer a new range of perspectives on the history of gardens and landscapes and suggest more inclusive ways of presenting and interpreting their stories. The series does not aim to point fingers or to encourage hand-wringing but is more a celebration of voices starting to be heard.

    This talk on April 26 at 2 pm Eastern is the third in our series aiming to hear voices previously absent from our garden history:

    When William III commissioned a pair of kneeling slaves for the privy garden at Hampton Court palace, he initiated a new genre of British garden sculpture. As the product of a culture that valued the profitability of the Atlantic slave economy, The Blackamoor, a.k.a. The Kneeling Slave, became the most popular of all the lead statues made for British gardens in the 18th century. Unlike the visualising Blackamoor, the source of income remained invisible in landscape gardens – as exemplified by Harewood in Yorkshire, where both ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton were consulted.

    This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the link, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 10 sessions at a cost of £40 (students £15) via the link here.

    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.

    Dr Patrick Eyres is editor of the unique, artist-illustrated New Arcadian Journal, which engages with the cultural politics of designed landscapes (53 editions since 1981: www.newarcadianpress.co.uk). He has also published in numerous other books and journals, most recently in Penny Florence (ed.), Thinking The Sculpture Garden (2020). For many years he served on the boards of the Little Sparta Trust, Garden History Society, Leeds Art Fund, and Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for the first ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History.