Boston Flora

Tag: Prospect Cottage

  • 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, April 9, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Derek Jarman’s Garden, Online

    Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. 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 (available for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite HERE

    The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely talented theater director, filmmaker and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station, almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.

    Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and still contributes to the MA program on West Midlands History at Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer in a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust online program, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press (2018).

    Image: Derek Jarman’s Cottage and Garden, photo ©Jill Francis