Join us for this special event to celebrate the Garden Museum's acquisition of the renowned landscape architect and artist W.A. Nesfield's archive, in partnership with The Gardens Trust.
With the Garden Museum’s acquisition of the landscape architect Nesfield’s archive, at this special evening event we will celebrate a designer who could work in both park and parterre. Selected items from the newly acquired archive will be on display for ticketholders to see before joining a lecture delivered by gardener, author, and podcaster Ben Dark.
In his obituary of 1881, W. A. Nesfield was dismissed as a slave to geometry. He was an enemy of graceful planting. A man whose expert hand, it was said, robbed Nature of dignity then buried her under coloured gravel.
But Nesfield’s guilt lay only in living too long. He endured to become a bogeyman for the ‘wild’ gardeners to form against. Nearly a century and a half later, it is time to see Nesfield as he was: an era-defining artist of rare intelligence and versatility.
A painter, sculptor, writer and thinker, whose sympathy for the architectural and naturalistic modes prefigure the Arts and Crafts Movement and whose unstinting travel between the aristocrats of England make him both the inheritor of a crown worn by Brown and Repton and the last virtuoso of a fading age.
Speakers
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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.
