Gardens and the Written Word

Through an exploration of drama, diaries, novels and magazines, this series will examine how writers have used gardens and plants to evoke memories, capture ideas of taste and fashion, satirise attitudes, champion social change and give deeper meaning to the world. The chosen authors cover almost four centuries of literature and, through examining their words, we can gain new understandings of the roles, meanings and emotive power of historic landscapes and horticulture.

Image: Photo by Debby Hudson from Unsplash, public domain

Please scroll down below the links to see the full details of each talk.

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This ticket is for the entire series of 5 talks, or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links below. (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 1 week 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 1 weeks.

Due to a recent Apple decision to charge a 30% fee for paid online events unfortunately you may no longer be able to purchase this ticket from the Eventbrite iOS app. Please use a web browser on desktop or mobile to purchase or follow the link here.

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. First in a series of 5 online lectures, £8 each or all 5 for £35 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25)

. Second in a series of 5 online lectures, £8 each or all 5 for £35 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25)

. Third in a series of 5 online lectures, £8 each or all 5 for £35 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25)

Fourth in a series of 5 online lectures, £8 each or all 5 for £35 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25)

. Last in a series of 5 online lectures, £8 each or all 5 for £35 (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25)

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Week 1. 2 October: Plants and Gardens in Shakespeare with Jill Francis

We experience gardens primarily through our senses - sight, sound, scent, touch, even taste. So how are they evoked so powerfully in literature when none of these sensory media are available to us? William Shakespeare uses botanical images throughout his plays to set the scene on the stage, to enhance the stories he is telling, and to illustrate more universal truths about the complexities of the human condition. For these potent images to work, he had to know that his audience would understand them – after all, they would not all have been expert gardeners, and neither, I suspect, was Shakespeare. This talk will explore how the playwright’s references to plants, flowers and horticulture contributed to the action on the stage, and at the same time, consider the extent to which these images must have reflected the assumed interests and knowledge of his audiences.

Dr Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. She was awarded her PhD in 2011 by the University of Birmingham where she teaches as a visiting lecturer for both the Centre for Midlands History and Cultures and the Winterbourne House and Gardens programme of activities. She is also currently involved with delivering the online programme of lectures for the Gardens Trust and 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 in June 2018.

Image: Shakespeare Institute Garden, June 2024. Photo © Jill Francis

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Week 2. 9 October: Travel Writing and Garden Visiting with Louise Crawley

The pastime of domestic travel for pleasure which swept through England’s ‘polite’ society in the long eighteenth century (c.1700 – c.1820) left a remarkable legacy of ‘amateur’ travel writing. Domestic tourists left detailed accounts of their thoughts and perceptions on country houses and designed landscapes, wider landscape scenes, and towns and cities, as they sought in-person experiences through which to demonstrate their grasp of taste and culture. This talk will explore the phenomenon of garden visiting and landscape appreciation as documented in the travel writing produced by tourists of the period. It will consider the experiences of travellers, how they perceived and interacted with landscapes and recorded their thoughts. It will also consider the concept of a specific descriptive ‘language’ of landscape, shared and understood by ‘polite’ people, and the value of travel writing for our understandings of historic gardens and landscapes today.

The image above shows the fictional Doctor Syntax sketching a lake in his tour diary, a satirical swipe at travellers created by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson (1813).

Louise Crawley is a postgraduate researcher in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia, specialising in eighteenth-century travel writing accounts of the British landscape. Recently, Louise has worked as landscape advisor and historian for English Heritage, and as a freelance consultant specialising in landscape conservation and restoration plans. This talk is based on research undertaken as part of her doctoral thesis examining the concept of a wider codified vocabulary of descriptive terms used to describe specific landscape forms and to communicate ‘taste’ in the eighteenth century.

Image: Doctor Syntax, Thomas Rowlandson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Week 3. 16 October: Jane Loudon – Author, Editor, Influencer with Rachel Savage

The career of Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is all too often overshadowed by that of her husband John Claudius Loudon, leaving the impression that she did indeed owe him ’all the knowledge of the subject she possesses’. By examining some of her key publications including Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840), The Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening and The Lady’s Country Companion (1845) we can better understand her legacy as knowledgeable botanist, best-selling gardening writer and ground-breaking magazine editor including the role she played in influencing, championing and challenging women’s roles within the garden, the home and wider society.

Dr Rachel Savage’s interest in garden history started over fifteen years ago whilst working as Head of Marketing for the RHS. Since then she has completed qualifications in horticulture, garden design, an MA in Landscape History at UEA and a PhD exploring house and garden design and the gendering of space in the nineteenth century. A trustee for the Gardens Trust, she has also contributed to Norfolk Garden Trust’s publications on Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.

Image: Jane Loudon and The Ladies’ Companion, public domain

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Week 4. 23 October: Jane Austen and the Landscape Garden with Laura Mayer

2017 marked two hundred years since the death of Jane Austen, at the age of 41, on 18 July 1817. Just like the English landscape garden, her novels have become one of Britain’s greatest cultural exports and made her one of the world’s most celebrated authors. Austen is justly famous for her sharp social satire, however, as this lecture will demonstrate, she was also highly attuned to the shifting sensibilities surrounding landscape.

Nature and landscape – whether real or imagined – and her characters response to these inform all of Austen’s novels, from Pride & Prejudice’s wickedly funny take on the Picturesque, to the lampooning of Humphry Repton in Mansfield Park. She was, after all, a writer who recognized that ‘to sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment’.

Dr Laura Mayer is an independent lecturer, writer and researcher, with an MA in Garden History and a PhD in eighteenth-century patronage. She has published extensively – particularly on Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, and Jane Austen’s contemporary, Humphry Repton – and works as a consultant for the National Trust and Land & Heritage. Laura shares Elizabeth Bennett’s appreciation of Gilpin’s Picturesque, as well as her talent for tramping about a garden inappropriately shod. She lectures regularly for Cambridge University Botanic Gardens and has been known to pen the odd limerick about Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Image: from Loudon’s The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Repton, Esq. (1840), courtesy of the University of Adelaide, public domain

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Week 5. 30 October: Marcell Proust and the Gardens of la Belle Époque with Ben Dark

Real and remembered gardens weave through the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. This talk will shake some of them loose, blossom hopefully intact, and examine what makes Proust the greatest ever writer on plants and the feelings they evoke.

In doing so we will explore the Pré Catelan Garden in Illiers (Proust's Combray), the Bois de Boulogne, the hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the seaside villas of the Côte Fleurie, examining how their unique treatments provide a window on changing attitudes to garden space in nineteenth and early twentieth century France. We’ll finish with a guide to planting your own Proustian Garden — one capable of provoking involuntary memories in visitors’ decades after they once called round for tea.

Ben Dark is an author, head gardener, broadcaster and landscape historian. He studied Horticulture at Capel Manor, before completing a traineeship at the Garden Museum and an MA in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research. As a gardener he has worked for embassies, cemeteries, heritage bodies and oligarchs. He hosts the award-winning Garden Log and Dear Gardener podcasts, while his book The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens (Mitchell Beazley, 2022) contains stories of life, death, love and flowers told by the plants of a single street. In 2022 he won the Journalist of the Year award from the Garden Media Guild.

Image: detail, Le Déjeuner (1873), Claude Monet, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Event Venue

Online