Hosted in partnership with The Gardens Trust, this course provides an introduction to the history of gardens and garden design through the ages.
This course offers students with little or no previous knowledge a chronological panorama of the development of garden history from medieval and Tudor gardens through to the twentieth century, and will end with the twenty-first century, tomorrow’s history in the making!
The sixteen lectures will run over four Saturday and be delivered by well-known speakers and experts in their fields.
Saturday 20 January
- What is Garden History?
- Medieval & early Tudor Gardens
- Elizabethan and early Stuart Gardens
- The Restoration and late 17th Century gardens
Saturday 27th January
- Early 18th Century gardens
- The Beauties of Flora Display’d : Flowers in the 18th Century Garden’
- Rise of the Landscape Movement
- Picturesque & Repton
Saturday 3rd February
- High Victorian design
- Victorian innovations: Technology, and plant introductions
- Public spaces: Victorian parks and cemeteries
- The rise of arts and crafts gardens
Saturday 10th February
- The Edwardian garden & its legacy
- The Rise of Modernism
- Key trends in late 20th Century garden design
- The 21st Century garden
Speakers
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Dr Jill Francis
Dr Jill Francis
Jill Francisis an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. She has taught history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and has delivered a number of Garden History courses at Winterbourne House in Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer on the IHR Garden and Landscape History programme and is has presented a number of on-line courses over the past year for the Gardens Trust. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her first book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press in June 2018.
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Tim Richardson
Tim Richardson
Tim Richardson is a gardens writer and historian, the author of a number of books including Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden, The New English Garden, Avant Gardeners and Great Gardens of America. He is a member of the National Trust's gardens advisory panel, a trustee of the Garden History Society, the author of Oxford University's course on landscape history and founder-director of the annual Chelsea Fringe Festival. He has two new books out this autumn: Oxford College Gardens (September) and Landscape and Garden Design Sketchbooks (November) and in June published his first volume of poetry: Righteous Ire of the Reincarnated Jethro Tull (Live Canon Press)
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Dr David Marsh
Dr David Marsh
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 was co-convener of the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes seminar at Institute of Historical Research, London University, from 2011-2022. He set up the Gardens Trust’s successful on-line lecture programme and is the author of their weekly blog about Garden History. Currently he is programme director for the MA in Garden History being run by Buckingham University, where he also supervises PhD students
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India Cole
India Cole
India Cole is an AHRC-CDP researcher based between Queen Mary University of London and Oxford Botanic Garden. Her research focuses on the botanist Mary Somerset, the first Duchess of Beaufort (1630-1715), but her interests are more broadly in the history of botany, gardening, and natural history in the early-modern period
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Judy Tarling
Judy Tarling
Judy Tarling has a first class honours degree in The Humanities with Classical Studies from the Open University and achieved a distinction in MA Garden History. Her dissertation was about the garden of Constantijn Huygens near The Hague. Her latest book Landscapes of Eloquence? finding rhetoric in the English landscape garden was published in 2020. The Sussex Gardens Trust has also published her work on Humphry Repton, William Gilpin and Gertrude Jekyll.
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Ben Dark
Ben Dark
Ben Dark is an author, head gardener, award-winning broadcaster and landscape historian. He graduated with a degree in History from Bristol University and studied Horticulture at Capel Manor College, before completing a traineeship at the Garden Museum and an MA in Garden and Landscape History at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. As a gardener he has worked for embassies, cemeteries, heritage bodies and oligarchs. As the creator and host of the award-winning Garden Log and Dear Gardener podcasts he frequently speaks to gardening groups and industry events.
His first book The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens is a year in the life of an ordinary street told through the extraordinary stories of the plants that grow there.
In 2022 he won Journalist of the Year and the Garden Media Guild awards for his magazine journalism. -
Cherrill Sands
Cherrill Sands
Cherrill Sands is a garden historian with an MA in the Conservation of Landscapes, Park & Gardens. She has been engaged as Historical Consultant at Painshill Landscape Garden in Surrey since 2004. As a freelance speaker she presents talks throughout the UK and abroad on garden history and theatre studies. Cherrill is a former Chair of the educational charity Surrey Gardens Trust and remains a member of their Research Team. She enjoys discovering the endless variety of gardens around the world and all aspects of garden history and design - while trying to impose some order on her own patch of ground at home
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Dr Oliver Cox
Dr Oliver Cox
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, Sport and Leisure in the Irish and British Country House, 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 programmes. Currently, he is Head of Academic Partnerships at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
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Karen Bridgman
Karen Bridgman
Karen Bridgman has been a professional horticulturist for over thirty years. Since 1997, she has been involved in historic garden restoration, with a particular interest in the plants available to 18th C gardeners. She has contributed to various publications on the subject of plants and planting in the 18th C garden. This interest began when she was involved in the Heritage Lottery funded restoration of the gardens of the 18th C naturalist Gilbert White in Selborne. Karen has worked for Painshill Park Trust since 2004. Originally responsible for sourcing and growing the plants for the American Roots exhibition, which opened in 2005, she then went on to set up the John Bartram Heritage Collection.
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Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wilson
Andrew is a former RHS show gardens judge, a past Chairman and a Fellow of both the Society of Garden Designers and the Landscape Institute. A respected author and writer with 11 books to his name including the No 1 Bestseller RHS Small Garden Handbook. He has been at the forefront of garden design teaching in the UK and overseas, for over 30 years.
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Karen Fitzsimon
Karen Fitzsimon
Karen is a chartered landscape architect, garden historian and horticulturist. Her research specialism is post-war designed landscapes, the documentation and conservation of which she champions. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Westminster investigating the practice of the modernist Danish landscape architect Preben Jakobsen.
Karen was consultant to the joint Historic England and Gardens Trust 'Modern Landscapes' project, which in 2020 saw 24 post-war landscapes added to the Register of Parks and Gardens of Historic Interest in England. Karen is a past recipient of the Garden History Society Essay Prize and has published and lectured widely about various aspects of landscape design and history. She is a visiting lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
