Percy Cane - Great 20th Century Gardener

This talk is the fourth in our series which will highlight some of the great names in twentieth century gardening: Percy Thrower, John Brookes, Rosemary Verey, Percy Cane and Beth Chatto. Their achievements will be brought to life in fascinating detail by some of our very best garden historians and presenters.

This ticket is for this individual session and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links above, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions via the link here.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link prior to the start of each session, and the session will be recorded and made available for one week to ticket holders.

Sept 22nd: Percy Cane by Jill Sinclair

Now a rather forgotten name, Percy Cane (1881-1976) was once the ‘go to’ garden designer for the rich and famous. In the 1950s, Country Life declared that he was as much in demand as Capability Brown had been. His clients included the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. He worked on important estates such as Dartington Hall in Devon and Falkland Palace in Scotland, as well as for international clients in France, Austria and Greece, and designed the grounds of the British Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. As well as amassing 8 Chelsea gold medals, Cane wrote extensively about garden design and attracted apprentices who went on to become Modernist trailblazers, including a young Christopher Tunnard. In this lecture, Jill will trace Cane’s influences, design style and significance, and explore how some of his gardens are being reinterpreted today by top designers such as Dan Pearson and Tom Stuart-Smith.

Jill Sinclair is a director of the Historic Gardens Foundation (www.historicgardens.org) and a tutor on English Landscape Gardens for the University of Oxford. Educated at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and with a Masters from the Inchbald School, Jill has written for the Garden History journal, Historic Gardens Review (including an article on Cane) and a variety of other scholarly and popular publications. She is currently advising a charitable group in Sheffield on the restoration of an early Cane garden.