Back by popular demand! After such a long delay after covid 19, we are delighted to be able to announce both in-person and online short courses. We look forward to seeing you this Spring at Burgh House or online. Please find details below and contact us if you have any questions. We take secure bookings and payments through our site so rest assured your details are stored securely and never shared with third parties.
Please read our frequently asked questions for more details.
-All will be revealed in this new six-week course-
This course is a stand-alone course but is a precursor to a ten week course beginning in September. Click here for further details.
Taught in person at Burgh House, London
or online - starts 23rd May 2024
Please note: There will be two optional days of garden visits in connection with this course. Dates to be announced shortly.
Course Outline
We begin with the arrival of Salomon de Caus in England in the early 1600’s. A brilliant French Huguenot mathematician and engineer. He brought with him first-hand knowledge of Italian Renaissance gardens and his own specialisation, hydraulic engineering. He was tutor to the heir to the throne, Henry, Prince of Wales and was one of the team designing a garden for him at Richmond Palace. De Caus appears soon after in accounts for Queen Anne of Denmark. We begin in her lost gardens with grottoes, automata, giants and miniature mountains.
Week 1
Queen Anne of Denmark – the Renaissance comes to London at Greenwich Palace and Denmark House (now Somerset House). We will examine her patronage of Salomon de Caus and the building of an English Mount Parnassus.
Week 2
Mary Capel Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (known as the botanist duchess). She collected, identified and classified plants, exotics from around the world as well as natives. She kept them in her Chelsea garden, Beaufort House and at Badminton in Gloucestershire. Later she began drying plants and created a 12 volume herbarium now held at the Natural History Museum in London.
Week 3
William III and Mary II at Hampton Court Palace. We discover the gardens at the Palace as their incredible exotic plant collection arrives from the Netherlands. It wasn’t only horticultural specimens they shipped but their garden designer Daniel Marot and Hans William Bentinck (he became Superintendent of the Royal Gardens of England).
Week 4
Queen Anne’s ‘greenhouse’ or Orangery and Queen Caroline’s revolving summer house, the gardens at Kensington Palace (and a peep at Richmond).
Week 5
Holland House, Kensington. The largest garden in London, here we will find plant collection, changing styles, changing owners and see unwanted visitors getting thrown out.
Week 6
Kew Gardens. Kew Park and Henry Capel (brother of the Duchess of Beaufort) and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the dowager Princess of Wales – two plant collectors who laid the foundations of the botanic gardens as we now know them.
Six gardens around London, from the early 17th to the early 19th Centuries.
1.5 hours a week for 6 weeks.
Prices
£150 for all 6 lectures in the course.
OR
£30 for one lecture only - You can specify which lecture you’d like to attend during the checkout process.
Information
This course will be taught In person at Burgh House from 23rd May 2024 at 1pm-2.30pm and each following Thursday OR you can take the course online later the same day.
Choose one of the following booking options below:
Course Outline
The first three parts of a new online series of lectures will focus on a diverse selection of extraordinary women. They are characters of eclectic taste, patrons and collectors of art, sculpture, botany, natural history and plants. Some of our women formed individual passions amongst these arts and sciences while others assembled collections of them all. They made gardens, grottoes, palaces, dairies, and created elaborate festivities with music and dance, sometimes with hidden political intent. In the first three parts, we will discover Isabella d’Este, Catherine de’ Medici and Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. We’ll assess their towering achievements, explore their astonishing lives and the legacies they’ve left us.
These three lectures can be booked together or as individual lectures below. More courses in the Women of Influence series will be announced soon.
Online Lecture
THURSDAY 4TH JULY 2024 AT 6 PM
A leading cultural figure of the Renaissance, Isabella d’Este was related to nearly every ruler in Italy either by birth or marriage. She made Mantua a centre of music, art, poetry, and gardens. A lover of clothes, she was a fashionista of her day, involved in the designs of her clothes, jewellery and even her perfume. Of outstanding intellect and unusually for a woman of her time she had her own studiolo and grotta for which she commissioned Andrea Mantegna's ‘Parnassus’. As a patron she was painted by the great artists of her time Mantegna, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci.
Online Lecture
THURSDAY 11th JULY 2024 AT 6 PM
A truly extraordinary figure, Catherine became Queen of France, but that was only one of her many roles. Daughter of a Duke, niece of a Pope, mother of three kings and two queens, and mother-in-law to Mary Queen of Scots. She eventually became the owner of Chateau de Chenonceau and made the gardens and palace of the Tuileries. She instigated some of the most incredible court festivals, known as her ‘magnificences’. She dressed up as a shepherdess when spending time in her dairy at Fontainebleau and if that was not enough she had a troupe of beautiful female spies, her ‘flying squadron’ and she travelled with her own portable triumphal arches.
Online Lecture
THURSDAY 18TH JULY 2024 AT 6 PM
One of the wealthiest women of 18th century England, she was a collector of art, natural history, botany and shells. After the death of her husband in 1762, she tended to the estate gardens at Bulstrode Park, adding a grotto, aviary and menagerie and introducing exotic plants, supplied by important botanists of the period: Philip Miller, Head Gardener at the nearby Chelsea Physic Garden, and Daniel Solander, the botanist and plant collector who accompanied Joseph Banks, another of her circle, on the HMS Endeavor to Australia. The Duchess of Portland’s great friend Mary Delany ‘a poor solitary grotto nymph’ was another great shell collector and it was during her staying at Bulstrode Park that she began her exquisite collage making.
Isabella d’Este THURSDAY 4TH JULY 2024
Catherine de’ Medici THURSDAY 11TH JULY 2024
Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland THURSDAY 18TH JULY 2024