This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 4 sessions at a cost of £16 via the link here.

[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, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

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This series on 4 Unforgettable Sussex Gardens follows a theme that is ‘Informed by their histories’. This reflects how the three individual gardens, and one group are all benefiting from new and on-going research into their design and plant collection archives, whether these are letters, catalogues and drawings etc., or, most excitingly, the surviving plants themselves.

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Week 1. 2nd February. Denmans Garden: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 2. 9th February. Highdown Gardens: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 3. 16th February. Borde Hill: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 4. 23 February. A selection of Sussex gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

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Week 1. 2 February. Denmans Garden: From Glorious to Controlled Disarray with Gwendolyn van Paasschen

Joyce Robinson, who started Denmans Garden in the late 1940s, referred to her garden as “Glorious Disarray”. John Brookes, who discovered the garden in 1973, just after she’d started her gravel gardens, fell in love with it, describing it as something ‘new’. He was intrigued by ‘the way she grew her plants in gravel’, a novel idea in the 1970s. He moved to Denmans in 1980 and over the next 38 years fused his bold lines, architectural plantings, and sculpture with her naturalistic style. At the end of his life, he described the garden as ‘Controlled Disarray’. The effort to restore the garden in the four years since John Brookes passed away has focused on preserving both legacies using photographs, writings, and first-hand stories and will include the development of a multi-year conservation plan and the transfer of the garden to the John Brookes-Denmans Foundation.

Gwendolyn van Paasschen is a garden designer and writer. Having worked with internationally renowned British landscape designer John Brookes MBE on a major multi-year project in Upstate New York, she helped write his memoir, A Landscape Legacy (Pimpernel Press, 2018), and is now chairman of the John Brookes-Denmans Foundation (JBDF) which she co-founded in 2017. The JBDF is dedicated to perpetuating John Brookes’ design legacy and to the renovation and preservation of Denmans Garden, his garden in West Sussex. She currently owns and runs Denmans Garden which includes a plant centre and retail space.

She has recently edited a collection of Brookes’s unpublished essays entitled How to Design A Garden which was published in October 2021.

www.denmans.org

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