Standen’s garden was created around the house designed by Philip Webb for the Beale family in 1894. Webb laid out the garden in keeping with the arts and crafts ethos of the house, but the planting reflects the middle-class artistic taste of Margaret Beale, an amateur gardener who recorded her successes and failures over nearly fifty years in her garden diary. This March 30 Sussex Gardens Trust talk will examine the origins of the garden and its development in the context of arts and crafts principles, and will consider the recent restoration of the garden by the National Trust.

Dr Caroline Ikin is a Curator at the National Trust with a specialism in garden history. She has previously worked in museums and for the Gardens Trust and her research interest is in nineteenth century art, architecture and gardens. Caroline is author of The Victorian Garden (Shire, 2012), The Victorian Gardener (Shire, 2014), The Kitchen Garden (Amberley, 2017), and is currently working on a new survey of Victorian gardens to be published by Bloomsbury and the National Trust. Caroline has written for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Garden History, the National Trust Cultural Heritage Magazine, Museums Journal and various other publications, and was awarded the Mavis Batey Essay Prize in 2022. She has lectured widely, including for the Gardens Trust, V&A, Watts Gallery, Sussex Gardens Trust, Oxford University, and Furniture History Society, as well as presenting conference papers. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Reading Ruskin in the Garden: the designed landscape at Brantwood 1871-1900’, explored John Ruskin’s garden through the lens of his late published works.

The lecture will be presented on Zoom. Registrants will receive a Zoom link ahead of the lecture, and a recording will be available for one week following the talk. £5.00 Register HERE.