THE DORSET GARDENS TRUST CHRISTMAS LECTURE AND LUNCH 2023

English Garden Eccentrics by Todd Longstaffe- Gowan

November 28th at Minterne House,  Minterne Magna, Dorchester DT2 7AU

10.00 am for coffee, lecture at 11.00 am

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals some of the obscure and eccentric English garden makers who created some immensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.   The characters include the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley, the animal and bird-loving Lady Read, and the celebrated master of Vauxhall gardens, Jonathan Tyers , who created one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England.   Others built miniature mountains, excavated caves, assembled architectural fragments and fossils, and displayed exotic animals.  Longstaffe-Gowan postulates these gardens were a form of autobiography and expressed the singularity of the characters behind them.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect with an international design practice based in London.  He is gardens advisor to Historic Royal Palaces and to the Crown Estate Paving Commission in Regent’s park, lecturer at New York University, President of the London Gardens Trust, Editor of the London Gardener, and author of several books including English Garden Eccentrics: three hundred years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries.

Tickets will not be available on the door for this lecture because we need to know numbers for catering.   Please buy your tickets by 24th November . This event is for Members only .