Forgotten Women Gardeners

Following the success of our series on gardeners last year we’re pleased to be offering six more lectures this time focusing on some less well-known women and their contributions to horticulture.

This ticket costs £24 for the entire course of 6 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5 via the links below.

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.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

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Week 1. 11 January. Introduction: Weeding, Writing and Illustrating: Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 2. 18 January. Alice “The All-Powerful” - Alice de Rothschild (1847 – 1922): Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 3. 25 January. Petticoats and Plants - The Untold Story of Scotland’s Gardening Women 1800-1930: Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 4. 1 February. A Passion for Plants and Politics - Lady Dorothy Nevill at Dangstein: Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 5. 8 February. Miss Willmott’s Ghosts: The Gardens of Ellen Ann Willmott through her own lens: Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 6. 15 February. Viscountess Frances Wolseley at Glynde and Beyond: Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

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Week 1. 11 January. Introduction: Weeding, Writing and Illustrating with Twigs Way

In this introduction to the series Twigs way will explore the broader history of women’s involvement in gardens from medieval weeders paid in ale and herrings to Victorian ladies gardening in corsets via ambitious royal creators of botanic gardens and forgotten illustrators. Highlighting the way in which women were forced into the margins of the traditional overview of garden history, we will shine a spotlight on the forgotten, the neglected and the poorly paid to whom the ‘art and craft of gardening’ in its broader context owes its existence.

Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs’ talks and books reflect themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. Twigs has a specific interest in the roles of women in and out of the garden, which was the topic of her first book. Twigs is an accredited Arts Society lecturer and her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion in 2020. She is currently working on the equally golden daffodil, but dreams of having a publisher for a biography of Frances Garnet Wolseley.

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Week 2. 18 January. Alice ‘The All-Powerful’: Alice de Rothschild (1847 – 1922) with Sophieke Piebenga

Alice de Rothschild was a member of the immensely rich European banking family of that name. Brought up on the continent, she developed Eythrope, the Buckinghamshire estate adjacent to her brother Ferdinand’s Waddesdon Manor, as ‘a showpiece’ garden. She also had a large property in Grasse, on the French Riviera, where she laid out a garden amongst the olive groves, adapting the paths specially to accommodate Queen Victoria’s donkey carriage on the latter’s various outings.

After her brother’s death Alice inherited the Waddesdon Estate, running all three properties with ‘an unusually strong power of will and inflexibility of purpose […], looking after every detail of her estate, undeterred by any opposition that she might meet with’. This is borne out by a unique series of letters, sent from Grasse back to her head gardener at Waddesdon, which contain detailed instructions for the garden.

Still adhering to the original High Victorian bedding schemes of the late 19th-century, Alice de Rothschild also developed a close friendship with Ellen A Willmott who advocated the much more informal style of gardening of William Robinson. 2022 is the centenary of Alice de Rothschild’s death which will be marked by various exhibitions at Waddesdon Manor and at Eythrope.

Dr Sophie Piebenga is the (part-time) gardens’ archivist at Waddesdon Manor, Bucks. Born and brought up in The Netherlands, she has spent all her adult life in the UK, training originally as a gardener with The National Trust and at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She diverged into the world of garden history, making the works of the landscape gardener W S Gilpin the topic of her DPhil study at the University of York. Now based in The Cotswolds she divides her time between gardening and giving garden advice, undertaking historic landscape research and leading garden tours for Boxwood Tours.

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Week 3. 25th Jan. (Burns Night) Petticoats and Plants: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Gardening Women 1800-1930 with Deborah Reid

The phenomenal success of Scotland’s gardening men has been well documented throughout history, but what of the women? Until now, there have been only glimpses of the extraordinary women who went ‘beyond their garden gates’ - women who cultivated, collected and made substantial contributions to horticulture within Britain. In this lecture, biographies of a selection of Scottish gardening women ranging from plant hunters to landscape architects reveal how they were effectively marginalised and why their work has largely been forgotten within the narrative of Scotland’s garden history.

Dr Deborah Reid promoted London’s Historic Royal Palaces and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre before swapping a career in Marketing and PR for plants. Having retrained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, she was awarded a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2015 for her thesis entitled ‘Unsung heroines of horticulture: Scottish gardening women, 1800 to 1930’ and has published widely on the subject, including the forthcoming work: Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in 19th Century Canada, edited by Ann Shteir (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where she lectures on the social history of gardening and mentors apprentice gardeners working within historic gardens at English Heritage properties. She is also a working gardener and serves as a trustee for Jock Tamson’s Gairden, a community garden in the heart of Edinburgh.

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Week 4. 1st February. A Passion for Plants and Politics: Lady Dorothy Nevill at Dangstein Sussex with Catherine Horwood

This talk focuses on the turbulent life of Lady Dorothy Nevill (1826-1913), who gardened at Dangstein, W. Sussex, where she amassed an enviable plant collection and interacted with Sir William Hooker of Kew and Charles Darwin. Although occasionally tainted by scandal, Lady Dorothy survived it all through a passion for both plants and politics.

Dr Catherine Horwood is an experienced speaker and the author of many books on social history including Gardening Women. Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010) and Potted History - How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (Pimpernel Press, 2020). Her biography Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants (Pimpernel Press, 2019) was selected as the European Garden Book of the Year in 2020.

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Week 5. 8th February. Miss Willmott’s Ghosts: The Gardens of Ellen Ann Willmott through her own lens with Sandra Lawrence

Horticulturalist, musician, botanist and polymath, Miss Ellen Willmott created three world-class gardens in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. None remain in the state in which she would have known them and two – at Warley Place in Essex and Tresserve in the French Alps - were destroyed after her death in 1934. Thanks to another of Willmott’s obsessions, however, we can at least glimpse into her world. We are only just beginning to understand the full extent of Ellen Willmott’s photography - which was both wide-ranging and high quality - and her published material represents a very small part of her output. This talk will explore Willmott’s gardens through her own images, many of which are newly discovered, discussing her techniques and comparing what she captured with what is left today.

Sandra Lawrence has written for all the broadsheets, many magazines and websites. Her fifteen books, for adults and children, include The Witch’s Garden (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew /Welbeck) and Anthology of Amazing Women (20-Watt). The Magic of Mushrooms will be published by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew/ Welbeck in autumn 2022.

Sandra first became interested in Ellen Willmott when she attended an open day at Warley Place as a child circa forty years ago and interest eventually turned to obsession. Her new biography, Miss Willmott’s Ghosts, will be published by Manilla in May 2022.

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Week 6. 15th February. Viscountess Frances Wolseley at Glynde and Beyond with Twigs Way

Founder of one of the earliest gardening schools for women, Frances Garnet Wolseley (1872-1936) was a champion of women’s right to work, and a lover of gardens. She was also a prolific author on topics relating both to her gardening school, women’s role on the land, and the countryside of Sussex. Her books on Gardening for Women (1908) and Women on the Land (1916) went beyond the confines of the school to suggest ways in which women could lead a revival of market co-operatives and smallholdings. During the war she took on official roles promoting the employment of women in farming but never lost her interest in the theory and practice of garden design.

Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. Twigs’ talks and books reflect themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. Twigs has a specific interest in the roles of women in and out of the garden, which was the topic of her first book. Twigs is an accredited Arts Society lecturer and her history of the Chrysanthemum in art and culture was published by Reaktion in 2020. She is currently working on the equally golden daffodil, but dreams of having a publisher for a biography of Frances Garnet Wolseley.

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