Unforgettable Gardens - Munstead Wood

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. Please note the earlier start time of 6pm.

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.

Surrey Gardens Trust are delighted to share some very special and unforgettable gardens from their rich legacy of historic parks and gardens.

Week 1. 6 Oct. Sutton Place: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 2. 13 Oct. Munstead Wood: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 3. 20 Oct. Muslim Memorial Peace Garden: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

Week 4. 27 Oct. Albury Park: Part of a series of 4 online lectures, £5 each or all 4 for £16.

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Week 2. 13 Oct. Munstead Wood with Richard Bisgrove

As anyone with an interest in garden history will know, the garden at Munstead Wood was the creation of Gertrude Jekyll, who lived there from the early 1880s until her death in 1932.

When Miss Jekyll bought the 15 acres (6 ha) of acid heathland across the lane from her mother's house, Munstead House, in 1882, most of the triangular plot had been logged of its pines and had developed a secondary growth of oak, sweet chestnut and pine with an understorey of holly. From an unprepossessing start, Miss Jekyll created a garden that achieved international renown. Her efforts were described in her books Wood and Garden (1899), Home and Garden (1900) and especially in Colour in the Flower Garden (1908), later published as Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden.

The enormous success of this last book leaves many people with the impression that Miss Jekyll cared only for colour, but in the closing remarks in the book, she wrote, 'If in the foregoing chapters I have dwelt rather insistently on matters of colour, it is not that I under-rate the equal importance of form and proportion, but that I think that the question of colour, as regards its more careful use, is either more commonly neglected or has had fewer exponents.'

In his talk, Richard Bisgrove will outline the full range of Gertrude Jekyll's gardening interests at Munstead Wood and comment on the challenges of caring for the garden in the 21st century.

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Richard Bisgrove gained a First-Class Honours degree in Horticultural Science at Reading (1965), a Master's in Landscape Architecture at the University of Michigan (1969), and then worked briefly as a landscape architect in Florida before returning to the University of Reading to lecture in Amenity Horticulture. In 1986, at Reading, he introduced Britain's first-degree course in Landscape Management, retiring as its Director in 2009.

Richard was for many years a member of the Council and Conservation Committee of the Garden History Society. He served for nineteen years on the Gardens Panel of the National Trust. He has lectured internationally and written eight books on aspects of garden design and garden history, including The National Trust Book of the English Garden (Viking 1990; Penguin 1992), The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (Frances Lincoln 1992; University of California Press 2000) and William Robinson: the wild gardener (Frances Lincoln 2008).

Richard has been awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society, the Peter Youngman Award by the President of the Landscape Institute and Honorary Fellowship of the Kew Guild.

Image: © detail, South Border at Munstead Wood, Helen Allingham (1900/1903), Garden Museum.