The Garden History Society, London 2015 Winter Lecture Series

The Garden History Society, Winter Lecture Series 2015

All lectures at Cowcross St, Wednesdays, doors open at 6.00pm

Andrew Harland, Landscape Architect, Senior Partner of LDA Design
Gorky Park
6.30 pm, Wednesday 28 January

Gorky Park is a Russian icon and a site of enormous historic importance made internationally famous by the eponymous book and film. Sadly, over recent decades, the park declined due to a lack of investment and weak management. Happily the Moscow Government has initiated a city wide park regeneration programme with Gorky Park as the flagship. The Park is now being transformed, based on the strategy prepared by LDA Design which aims to make it, once again, a world class park.

Dr Clare Hickman, Medical and Landscape Historian
Therapeutic Landscapes: The role of gardens in English hospital settings since 1800
6.30 pm,Wednesday 11 February

This talk will explore the role of the landscapes associated with psychiatric, general and specialist medical institutions and ask what they looked like, how were they used and how this related to medical concepts. Clare will trace the history of these gardens from the grottos, Chinese galleries and summer houses of elite nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, through Florence Nightingale’s championing of the Victorian pavilion hospital design with its courtyard gardens, to the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets.

Richard Wheeler, Garden Historian, National Trust
Gardens in the Romantic Era: The Associative nature of the Reception of Gardens at the End of the 18th Century and Beginning of the 19th Century
6.30 pm, Wednesday 25 February

Richard Wheeler has worked for the National Trust for the last 37 years, and is now the Trust’s specialist in Garden History. In this lecture he will explore how the gardens of the early and mid eighteenth century were received by the next generation, and how the advent of the Romantic Era influenced their perception of their fathers’ work. The primary case studies in this lecture will be Croome, Studley Royal, Wimpole and Wrest.

Karen Fitzsimon, Landscape Architect, Horticulturist
Order in the Landscape: Rediscovering Preben Jakobsen
6.30pm, Wednesday 11 March

Preben Jakobsen (1934 - 2012) was an important award winning landscape architect who practiced in the UK from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. He inspired a generation through his modernist approach to landscape design, his exceptional use of plants and his belief that landscape design could be a true art form. Karen’s research is the first posthumous evaluation of Jakobsen’s work and benefits from unique access to his practice archives. This illustrated talk will look at a number of his works, consider why he has not been better remembered, and what his design legacy may be.

Dr Jane Whitaker, Writer, Lecturer, Consultant in Garden History
Gardens Fit for a Queen: the Elizabethan Gardens at Cowdray and Bisham
6.30 pm, Wednesday 25 March

Focusing in detail on her recent research of two leading gardens at Cowdray in Sussex and Bisham in Berkshire, Jane Whitaker discusses some of the principal elements, influences and purposes which informed the design of these important Elizabethan gardens. Surveying both gardens and the wider landscape as the setting for personal enjoyment, productive use, sport, entertainment and the display of status, she illustrates their importance for the Elizabethan élite.

For further information and availability of seats, please contact:

E-mail: events@gardenhistorysociety.org

Telephone: 020 7608 2409

Website: www.gardenhistorysociety.org/events

The GHS Winter Lecture Series is supported by Alan Baxter and Associates