Lectures,
Talks and Courses 2009
These subjects can be
taken as a 50 minute powerpoint or slide presentation or a Study class
(half or full day), please ask for details
Lectures
based on Caroline Holmes’ books and consultancies
1.
Follies of Europe – architectural extravaganzas
2.
Why Violets shrink and answers to other thorny questions
3.
Permission to Poison - The Poison Garden, The Alnwick Garden
4.
Dung Dreaming
5.
Monet at Giverny
6. Icons of Garden Design
7. A
Zest for Herbs
8.
Victorian Gardens for the nineteenth century home owner
9.
A Green Chronology of
Gardens: the creation of the historic
gardens at Yalding Organic Gardens
Other lectures,
subject to discussion these can be tailored to the specialist interest
of the audience
10.
The Thinker’s Guide to Gardens
Let landscapes consult your genius and delight in
the sixth sense of gardens. Many great gardens and some small were
created to exude power and conceit, love or faith through sight, touch,
scent, sound and naturally good taste. With subtle or overt pointers in
the form of statuary and sculpture, iconic design and symbolic planting
the narrative unravels. There is more to the popular statues of flower
bedecked Flora and Venus the goddess of all growing things. Walking the
landscape with your feet and your eyes can range from an initiation
ceremony to a political rant whilst furthering the earth’s association
with the planets.
11.
A Walk through Garden History
This can be tailored to gardens within a 50 mile
radius of the host venue
12.
The French Garden at its zenith –
the Sun King and Le Notre –
radiant and radiating
The innovative perfection of the marriage of
architecture and landscaping epitomized by Andre Le Notre, Louis Le Vau
and Charles Le Brun at Vaux le Vicompte ruined Nicolas Fouquet but
inspired his master, Louis XIV. The hunting lodge at Versailles was
transformed over many decades into a triumph of space – avenues,
parterres, fountains, sculptures – where the radiant vistas radiated.
The Sun King’s supreme taste extended into the Potager du Roi where de
la Quintinie turned the raising of fruit and vegetables into an art
form. Versailles’ vast landscape both dominated and powerfully drew in
the countryside and, therefore, the French into its thrall – no wonder
it is regarded as France’s ‘heroic period’.
13. British Houses and Gardens
Explores how architecture, need,
fashion and fantasy have shaped and linked houses and gardens. This
presentation is taken chronologically, examining the English vernacular,
royal demesnes, a celebration of eighteenth century masterpieces and the
romanticism and innovation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The phrase Le jardin anglais is an epithet used throughout
Europe to describe the gentle arboreal landscapes of Britain whilst the
English Garden evokes scenes of romantic cottage abundance. British
houses and gardens have resolutely looked back to look forward: this
presentation will examine these links within Britain and the eclectic
inspiration from exotic foreign sources such as the pumpkins and
pepperpots of the Brighton Pavilion or the design impact of the sliding
door.
14. Romance and religion in the Medieval Garden
Apart from contemporary prose and poetry, medieval
illuminated manuscripts and tapestries are an important reference source
for plants for use and delight and their settings. This presentation
starts with Bede and the sparkling lights of the Dark Ages working up to
the parks, orchards and herbers for the pleasure of the senses that
prepared the soil for the Renaissance. The symbolic planting and use of
the Medieval Garden was a powerful metaphor for paradise as well as pure
and romantic love, enjoyed in full measure by Chaucer.
The approach will be to shed light on the
subject with reverence and irreverence, romanticism and eroticism.
15. The Tudor Garden - cultivating the Renaissance in England
Italian Renaissance design and intricacies arrived
in England via France and the Low Countries, manifesting a revolutionary
attitude to the ‘taming’ of nature. Cardinal Wolsey was at its
forefront, his extravagant tastes adopted by Henry VIII. This is the
beginning of houses and gardens being designed as a unified whole, the
motifs found on the house exterior and its interior panelling,
plasterwork and needlework matched in garden conceits such as knots and
quincunxes. Gardens can be glimpsed in portraits and wood cuts as
settings for courtly dalliance, philosophical discussion, meditation and
theatre, as well as allegorical and moral instruction. The Tudor dynasty
closes with Gloriana’s Glass as a prodigious emblem of Elizabeth I.
16. The Stuart Garden
- most pleasant
variegated verdure
Tudor intellectual and adventuring greatness provides the rootstock for
Jacobean scions which flourish as courtly arts in an architectural
garden. The impact of the Rose and Lily Queen Henrietta Maria and her
gardeners, the Tradescants encouraged innovation. After the ‘fall’ the
Commonwealth imposed austere horticultural tastes whilst the spiritual
uses of an orchard were expounded. Closed knots opened into parterres
with the grandiose formality of William and Mary where designs radiate
inside and out and gardens provide galleries for ceramics, ironwork and
statuary. The restoration of The Privy Garden at Hampton Court Palace
illustrates this for today’s visitor as do the contemporary bird’s eye
records of Kip and Knyff of the work of London and Wise who redesigned
countless British great estates into mini versions of Versailles.
17.
The Georgian Garden
1712-1783
–
intellectual gymnastics to
formulaic intelligence
The high formality of
Stuart Baroque, recorded in graphic detail by Kip and Knyff in the early
eighteenth century, was initially swept into intellectual classical
scenes followed by commercially viable Brounian landscapes. The
beautiful and sublime of nature had been captured on canvas by Salvator
Rosa, Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin
during the late seventeenth century offering an idealized view of the
Roman compagna. Whilst Palladio inspired architects, William Kent
designed 'landskips' for classically educated Grand Tour nobility. The
role call includes Pope, Burlington, Vanbrugh, Walpole, Kent, Adam and
Brown. Using contemporary illustrations and existing sites, the
presentation will include Studley Royal and Fountains Abbey, Stourhead,
Castle Howard, Painshill, Chatsworth and Stowe.
18. The Georgian Garden Part II 1783-1837
Working landscapes
combining beauty and utility, seeking the sublime Picturesque
experience, more mundanely the Gardenesque of John Claudius Loudon.
Humphry Repton and the Red Books. Joseph Banks, Australia and Kew
gardens. Le jardin anglais. The Prince Regent and the taste for
Xanadu.
19.
The Man who saw Capabilities
The formulaic intelligence of Lancelot ‘Capability’
Brown’s smooth landscapes
20.
The Victorian Garden - the quest for the best
The French and Italian formalities of Barry,
Nesfield and Blomfield and informal Arts and Crafts of
Robinson; collector's gardens like Biddulph Grange mirroring the fern
craze, Chinese and Italianate styles. Bedding plants as a display of
wealth at the Rothschild's Waddesdon Manor. The artisan and his garden
at The Plantation Garden, Norwich and Caroline Holmes' The Victorian
Artisan's Garden at Yalding Gardens, Kent.
21. The Edwardian Garden – golden and delicious
These gardens of a golden afternoon can be glimpsed
in stunning black and white photographs and nostalgic cottage paintings.
The Mediterranean inspired the architecture of Harold Peto’s designs and
the colours in Gertrude Jekyll’s early paintings and later plantings.
Peto’s richest client was Daisy, Countess of Warwick for whom he
designed in the grand Italianate manner at Warwick House. The English
house and garden of Edwardian imagination was perfected by Gertrude
Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens in 70 projects. Known as the Surrey Style it is
showcased in the architecture and gardens of her former home, Munstead
Wood. Away from the grand terraces and billowing herbaceous borders the
kitchen garden reached a zenith of fruit and vegetable culture – visual
and edible feasts in the ground and on the plates of contemporary
gardening books.
22. The Interwar Garden – grand manner to Henry Moore
A tour through the inspirations, plans and
creations of three major designers: the social hostess Norah Lindsay and
her work at The Manor House, Sutton Courtenay, Blickling Hall, Port
Lympne and Hidcote Manor – cottage formality. America’s first Landscape
Architect Beatrix Farrand who travelled from the States to design
gardens and surroundings for Dartington Hall; she achieved a sympathy
with its history and the idealist community for the arts created by its
owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst. Thirdly, Christopher Tunnard, the
anti-cottage gardening element, whose work is a testament on paper to
the Modern Movement, circumstances meant that it was rarely developed
but has remained influential in showcasing modern sculpture in garden
settings.
23. Twentieth Century European
Folly Makers
The major definition of modern architecture is that
form follows function and design draws on a scientific and aesthetic
appreciation of nature. Follies have exploded these strictures of taste
and the dust continues to swirl into surrealist patterns. An egalitarian
recognition of unschooled art is expressed in the hands of the common
man alongside the wealthy aesthete and the public desire for
individualistic environments. Follies illustrated include La Maison
Picassiette, Le Palais Idéal, Parque Güell, The Sheep’s Barn, The John
Fairnington Cement Menagerie and the Château de Groussay. Wacky ideas
run like coloured threads through the weave of eclectic follies inspired
by Modernism and Individualism.
24. Beyond the Cloisters – the
Journey of the Bury Cross
The hunting of a walrus in the late 7th
century was transformed into one of the finest examples of religious
carving encapsulating the Old and New Testaments – exquisite art and
intricate meaning. Assuming that the Bury and Cloisters Cross are one in
the same, we follows its physical and spiritual journeys from the sea to
St. Edmund’s magnificent abbey in Suffolk, as ransom for Richard the
Lionheart, into an earthly grave in Hungary and its resurrection in The
Cloisters Museum in New York. The wondrous carving on both sides of the
cross relate to very specific verses in the Bible unfolding the
Christian story from Adam and Eve to the Passion of Christ.
25.
The Artful Flora – canvases of
virtue, vice and sweet sentiment
Oak, orange, holly, rose, lily, pinks and violet
appear in many symbolic guises from classical to modern world artworks.
The pleasing pattern in a dark wood of trees and flowers are an integral
part of Medieval, Renaissance and Arts and Crafts tapestries adding
colour and a range of sentiments. The early Dutch Still-Lives advertised
the skill of their nurseries, later allowing the manifestation of
forbidden religious practices and a reminder of human mortality. Scenes
from the Bible and Shakespeare in Pre Raphaelite paintings are enhanced
by the symbolic subtext of the plants within and around the frame –
rarely do they augur well.
26. The Roman Garden with special reference to Pompeii
27. The Scented Garden
28.
Parterres:
their history, creation and maintenance
Fees: £250-£350/$500 for
a 50-90 minute presentation; £400/$600 for half day series; £600/$750
for day workshop plus expenses
