Eliza Acton ‘The Real Mrs Beeton’

Elizabeth “Eliza” Acton (17 April 1799 – 13 February 1859) was an English cook and poet, who produced one of the country’s first cookbooks aimed at the domestic reader, rather than professional cooks or chefs: Modern Cookery for Private Families. This introduced the now-universal practice of listing ingredients and giving suggested cooking times with each recipe. It included the first recipe for Brussels sprouts. Isabella Beeton’s bestselling Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) was closely modelled on it. Delia Smith is quoted as calling Acton “the best writer of recipes in the English language”. Modern Cookery long survived her, remaining in print until 1914.

Life

Acton was born in Battle, Sussex in 1799, the eldest of the five children of Elizabeth Mercer and John Acton, a brewer. The family returned to Suffolk shortly after her birth, and Eliza was raised there. When she was seventeen, she co-founded a girls’ school with a Miss Nicholson in Claydon, near Ipswich. This remained open for four years, until Eliza Acton left due to poor health. She spent some time in France after this.

After returning to England, her first collection of Poems was published in 1826, mostly on the theme of unrequited love. The book was moderately successful, and was reprinted a few weeks after its first issue. She subsequently wrote some standalone, longer poems, including “The Chronicles of Castel Framlingham”, which was printed in the Sudbury Chronicle in 1838, and “The Voice of the North”, which was written in 1842 on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s first visit to Scotland.

Acton’s best-known work Modern Cookery for Private Families was first published in 1845. It was the result of several years of research, undertaken at the prompting of Longman, who had published her Poems. Many of the recipes came from her friends. Modern Cookery quickly became a very popular work, appearing in several editions and remaining a standard cookery book throughout the rest of the century. The book was immensely influential, establishing the format for modern cookbook writing, by listing the exact ingredients required for each recipe, the time needed, and potential problems that might arise. This was a novel departure from previous cookbooks, which were less precise.

Shortly after the publication of Modern Cookery, Acton relocated to Hampstead, London, where she worked on her next and final book, The English Bread Book (1857). Alongside recipes, this contained a scholarly history of bread-making, which included Acton’s strong opinions on some contemporary baking practices. This work was significantly less successful than Modern Cookery, and was only reprinted in 1990.

Acton, who suffered from poor health for much of her life, died in 1859, at the age of 59. She was buried in Hampstead.

Works

•                Poems (London: Longmans, 1826)

•                “The Chronicles of Castel Framlingham” (poem, was in the movie Sudbury Chronicle, 1838)

•                “The Voice of the North” (commemorative poem about the first visit of Queen Victoria to Scotland in 1842)

•                Modern Cookery for Private Families (London: Longmans, 1845)

The English Bread Book (1857)

 

Bloomsbury : Roger Fry.

Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the “associated ideas” conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as “incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin … In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry”.^‪

Life

Born in London, the son of the judge Edward Fry, he grew up in a wealthy Quaker family in Highgate. Fry was educated at Clifton College and King’s College, Cambridge,‬ where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles. After taking a first in the Natural Science tripos, he went to Paris and then Italy to study art. Eventually he specialised in landscape painting.

In 1896, he married the artist Helen Coombe and they subsequently had two children, Pamela and Julian. Helen soon became seriously mentally ill, and in 1910 was committed to a mental institution, where she remained for the rest of her life. Fry took over the care of their children with the help of his sister, Joan Fry. That same year, Fry met the artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, and it was through them that he was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa’s sister, the author Virginia Woolf later wrote in her biography of Fry that “He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together”. The artist William Rothenstein, however, observed around the same time that he considered Fry “a bit crazy”.

In 1911, Fry began an affair with Vanessa Bell, who was recovering from a miscarriage. Fry offered her the tenderness and care she felt was lacking from her husband. They remained lifelong close friends, even though Fry’s heart was broken in 1913 when Vanessa fell in love with Duncan Grant and decided to live permanently with him.

After short affairs with such artists as Nina Hamnett and Josette Coatmellec, Fry too found happiness with Helen Maitland Anrep. She became his emotional anchor for the rest of his life, although they never married (she too had had an unhappy first marriage, to the mosaicist Boris Anrep).

Fry died very unexpectedly after a fall at his home in London. His death caused great sorrow among the members of the Bloomsbury Group, who loved him for his generosity and warmth. Vanessa Bell decorated his casket before his ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge. Virginia Woolf, Vanessa’s sister, novelist and a close friend of his as well, was entrusted with writing his biography, published in 1940.

Career

In the 1900s, Fry started to teach art history at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

In 1903 Fry was involved in the foundation of The Burlington Magazine, the first scholarly periodical dedicated to art history in Britain. Fry was its co-editor between 1909 and 1919 (first with Lionel Cust, then with Cust and More Adey) but his influence on The Burlington Magazine continued until his death: Fry was in the Consultative Committee of The Burlington since its beginnings and when he left the editorship, following a dispute with Cust and Adey regarding the editorial policy on modern art, he was able to use his influence on the Committee to choose the successor he considered appropriate, Robert Rattray Tatlock.^‪ Fry wrote for The Burlington from 1903 until his death: he published over two hundred pieces of eclectic subjects – from children’s drawings to bushman art. From the pages of The Burlington it is also possible to follow Fry’s growing interests for Post-Impressionism.

In 1906 Fry was appointed Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This was also the year in which he “discovered” the art of Paul Cézanne, also the year the artist died, beginning the shift in his scholarly interests away from the Italian Old Masters and towards modern French art.

In November 1910, Fry organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term which he coined) at the Grafton Galleries, London. This exhibition was the first to prominently feature Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, and Van Gogh in England and brought their art to the public. Virginia Woolf later said, “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” referring to the effect this exhibit had on the world. Fry followed it up with the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. It was patronised by Lady Ottoline Morrell, with whom Fry had a fleeting romantic attachment.

In 1913 he founded the Omega Workshops, a design workshop based in London’s Fitzroy Square, whose members included Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In 1933, he was appointed the Slade Professor at Cambridge, a position that Fry had much desired.

A Blue plaque was unveiled in Fitzroy Square on 20 May 2010.

Works

• Vision and Design (1920), see: formal analysis
• Heresies of an Artist (1921)
• Transformations (1926)
• Cézanne. A Study of His Development (1927)
• Henri Matisse (1930)
• French Art (1932)
• Reflections on British Painting (1934)
• Giovanni Bellini (1899)

A Hidden Bloomsbury Group Retreat : Charleston House Ease Sussex

Charleston, in East Sussex is a property associated with the Bloomsbury group, that is open to the public. It was the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is an example of their decorative style within a domestic context, representing the fruition of over sixty years of artistic creativity. Vanessa Bell wrote of this time; “It will be an odd life, but … it ought to be a good one for painting.”

In addition to the house and artists’ garden, there is an exhibition gallery showing a mix of contemporary and historical shows of fine and decorative art, a Crafts Council selected shop selling applied art and books relating to Bloomsbury, a small tea room and a video presentation. Charleston hosts a number of special events throughout the year, most notably the Charleston Festival which is centred on talks and drama relating to literary, artistic and Bloomsbury themes.

The house is located in the village of Firle, in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England.

History

In 1916 the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Sussex with their unconventional household. Over the following half century Charleston became the country meeting place for the group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as Bloomsbury. Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry were frequent visitors. Inspired by Italian fresco painting and the Post-Impressionists, the artists decorated the walls, doors and furniture at Charleston. The walled garden was redesigned in a style reminiscent of southern Europe, with mosaics, box hedges, gravel pathways and ponds, but with a touch of Bloomsbury humour in the placing of the statuary.

“It’s most lovely, very solid and simple, with … perfectly flat windows and wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it.” — Vanessa Bell

The rooms on show form a complete example of the decorative art of the Bloomsbury artists: murals, painted furniture, ceramics, objects from the Omega Workshops, paintings and textiles. The collection includes work by Auguste Renoir, Picasso, Derain, Matthew Smith, Sickert, Tomlin and Eugène Delacroix.

Garden

Charleston’s walled garden was created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to designs by Roger Fry. Together they transformed vegetable plots and hen runs, essential to the household during the First World War, into a quintessential planted garden mixing Mediterranean influences with cottage garden planting. In the 1920s a grid of gravel paths gave structure to beds of plants chosen by Grant and Bell for their intense colour and silver foliage. These became the subject of many still lives over their long residence at Charleston. Dora Carrington wrote of the garden, “Never, never have I seen quite such a wonderful place! … What excellent things there will be to paint in that garden with the pond and buildings.” Part of the garden’s sense of luxuriance and surprise comes from the variety of sculpture it contains. Classical forms sit side by side with life-size works by Quentin Bell, mosaic pavements and tile edged pools. The orchard offers shade from the sun and the pond a focus for tranquil contemplation. Above all this was a summer garden for playing and painting, an enchanted retreat from London life. As Vanessa Bell wrote in 1936, “The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes … lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples.”

Charleston Trust

The Charleston Trust is a charity set up in 1980 to restore and maintain the home of the Bloomsbury Group artists for the benefit of the public. The unique collection at Charleston is illustrative of the art and lifestyle of the influential Bloomsbury Group and has been on show to the public since 1986. Charleston attracts visitors from the local community as well as the rest of the UK and abroad. Today although Charleston is no longer in crisis, its future is far from secure. The Charleston Trust does not have the funds to guarantee the preservation of the house for future generations and relies on its income from admissions, sales from the shop and tea room, membership fees from the Friends of Charleston and grants from various bodies and donations.

Events and exhibitions

The Charleston Festival takes place around May each year in a marquee in the gardens of the house and lasts about a week and a half. It is predominantly a literary festival that has hosted such figures as Peter Bazalgette, Jung Chang, Michael Frayn, Patrick Garland, Stephen Poliakoff, Patti Smith, Sarah Waters, Polly Toynbee and Simon Schama.

It also holds an exhibition programme that has included: Norman Ackroyd, Stephen Finer, Derek Jarman, Desmond Morris, Tom Phillips, photographs by Patti Smith, Sir John Tenniel and others.

There is also another single night event, The Quentin Follies, named after Quentin Bell, the son of Vanessa Bell, that raises money to buy back works of art by the Bloomsbury Set that are privately owned. It takes the form of a silent auction of donated works of art and an evening variety show with a number of acts from opera singing to music hall to stand-up comedy.

Royal Botanical Gardens Kew : The Worlds Largest Collection Of Living Plants ….

Kew Gardens is the world’s largest collection of living plants. Founded in 1840 from the exotic garden at Kew Park in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, UK, its living collections include more than 30,000 different kinds of plants, while the herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over seven million preserved plant specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London’s top tourist attractions. In 2003, the gardens were put on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

Kew Gardens, together with the botanic gardens at Wakehurst Place in Sussex, are managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (brand name Kew), an internationally important botanical research and education institution that employs 750 staff, and is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The Kew site, which has been dated as formally starting in 1759, though can be traced back to the exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury, consists of 121 hectares (300 acres) of gardens and botanical glasshouses, four Grade I listed buildings and 36 Grade II listed structures, all set in an internationally significant landscape.

Kew Gardens has its own police force, Kew Constabulary, which has been in operation since 1847.

History

Kew, the area in which Kew Gardens are situated, consists mainly of the gardens themselves and a small surrounding community. Royal residences in the area which would later influence the layout and construction of the gardens began in 1299 when Edward I moved his court to a manor house in neighbouring Richmond (then called Sheen). That manor house was later abandoned; however, Henry V built Sheen Palace in 1501, which, under the name Richmond Palace, became a permanent royal residence for Henry VII. Around the start of the 16th century courtiers attending Richmond Palace settled in Kew and built large houses. Early royal residences at Kew included Mary Tudor’s house, which was in existence by 1522 when a driveway was built to connect it to the palace at Richmond.Around 1600, the land that would become the gardens was known as Kew Field, a large field strip farmed by one of the new private estates.

The exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury, was enlarged and extended by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, the widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The origins of Kew Gardens can be traced to the merging of the royal estates of Richmond and Kew in 1772. William Chambers built several garden structures, including the lofty Chinese pagoda built in 1761 which still remains. George III enriched the gardens, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks. The old Kew Park (by then renamed the White House), was demolished in 1802. The “Dutch House” adjoining was purchased by George III in 1781 as a nursery for the royal children. It is a plain brick structure now known as Kew Palace.

Some early plants came from the walled garden established by William Coys at Stubbers in North Ockendon. The collections grew somewhat haphazardly until the appointment of the first collector, Francis Masson, in 1771. Capability Brown, who became England’s most renowned landscape architect, applied for the position of master gardener at Kew, and was rejected.

In 1840 the gardens were adopted as a national botanical garden, in large part due to the efforts of the Royal Horticultural Society and its president William Cavendish. Under Kew’s director, William Hooker, the gardens were increased to 30 hectares (75 acres) and the pleasure grounds, or arboretum, extended to 109 hectares (270 acres), and later to its present size of 121 hectares (300 acres). The first curator was John Smith.

The Palm House was built by architect Decimus Burton and iron-maker Richard Turner between 1844 and 1848, and was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron. It is considered ” the world’s most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure.” The structure’s panes of glass are all hand-blown. The Temperate House, which is twice as large as the Palm House, followed later in the 19th century. It is now the largest Victorian glasshouse in existence. Kew was the location of the successful effort in the 19th century to propagate rubber trees for cultivation outside South America.

In February 1913, the Tea House was burned down by suffragettes Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton during a series of arson attacks in London. Kew Gardens lost hundreds of trees in the Great Storm of 1987^. From 1959 to 2007 Kew Gardens had the tallest flagpole in Britain. Made from a single Douglas-fir from Canada, it was given to mark both the centenary of the Canadian Province of British Columbia and the bicentenary of Kew Gardens. The flagpole was removed after damage by weather and woodpeckers

In July 2003, the gardens were put on the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

The New York Botanical Garden, Where Viagra Helps The Plants !!!!!

 

The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is a designated national landmark botanical garden located in the Bronx, New York City. It spans some 250 acres (100 ha) of Bronx Park and is home to the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory. The facility offers exhibitions and flower shows throughout the year and is visited by over 900,000 visitors annually.

Mission statement

The New York Botanical Garden is an advocate for the plant kingdom. The Garden pursues its mission through its role as a museum of living plant collections arranged in gardens and landscapes across its National Historic Landmark site; through its comprehensive education programs in horticulture and plant science; and through the wide-ranging research programs of the International Plant Science Center.

History

The Lorillard family owned most of the land that later became the New York Botanical Garden. That land and adjacent acreage was acquired by the City of New York and set aside for the creation of a zoo and botanical garden. The Garden was established on 28 April 1891 on part of the grounds of the Lorillard Estate (formerly owned by the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard) and a parcel that was formerly the easternmost portion of the campus of St. John’s College (now Fordham University). The Garden’s creation followed a fund-raising campaign led by the Torrey Botanical Club and Columbia University botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth Gertrude Britton who were inspired to emulate the Royal Botanic Gardens in London. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1967.

Grounds

The Garden contains 50 different gardens and plant collections. Sightseers can easily spend a day admiring the serene cascade waterfall, wetlands and a 50-acre (20 ha) tract of original, old-growth New York forest, never logged, containing oaks, American beeches, cherry, birch, tulip and white ash trees—some more than two centuries old.

Garden highlights include an 1890s-vintage, wrought-iron framed, “crystal-palace style” greenhouse by Lord & Burnham, now Haupt Conservatory; the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden (originally laid out by Beatrix Jones Farrand in 1916); a rock garden; a 37-acre (15 ha) conifer collection; extensive research facilities including a propagation center, 550,000-volume library, and an herbarium of over seven million botanical specimens dating back more than three centuries.

At the heart of the Garden are 50 acres (20 ha) of old-growth forest, the largest existing remnant of the original forest which covered all of New York City before the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century. The forest itself is split by the Bronx River, the only fresh water river in New York City, and this stretch of the river includes a riverine canyon and rapids. Along the shores sits the landmark Stone Mill, previously known as the Lorillard Snuff Mill built in 1840. Sculptor Charles Tefft created the Fountain of Life on the grounds in 1905. “It was conceived in the spirit of Italian baroque fountains, with the surging movement of galloping horses and muscular riders.”

Research laboratories

The Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, built with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New York State and New York City, and named for its largest private donor, is a major new research institution at the Garden that opened in 2006. The laboratory is a pure research institution, with projects more diverse than research in universities and pharmaceutical companies.

The laboratory’s research emphasis is on plant genomics, the study of how genes function in plant development. One question scientists hope to answer is Darwin’s “abominable mystery”; when, where, and why flowering plants emerged. The laboratory’s research also furthers the discipline of molecular systematics, the study of DNA as evidence that can reveal the evolutionary history and relationships of plant species. Staff scientists also study plant use in immigrant communities in New York City and the genetic mechanisms by which neurotoxins are produced in some plants, work that may be related to nerve disease in humans.

A staff of 200 trains 42 doctoral students at a time, from all over the world. Since the 1890s, scientists from The New York Botanical Garden have mounted about 2,000 exploratory missions worldwide to collect plants in the wild.

At the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, genomic DNA from many different species of plants is extracted to create a library of the DNA of the world’s plants. This collection is stored in a 768-square-foot (71.3 m²) DNA storage room with 20 freezers housing millions of specimens, including rare, endangered or extinct species. To protect the collection during winter power outages, there is a backup 300-kilowatt electric generator.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has granted the NYBG $572,000 to begin a project called TreeBOL, the Tree Barcode of Life. By sampling the DNA from all 100,000 different species of trees from around the world over the next few years, TreeBOL will document the diversity of plant life, and advance the process of plant DNA barcoding.

LuEsther T. Mertz Library

When, in 1881, land was set aside by the New York State Legislature for the creation of “a public botanic garden of the highest class” for the City of New York, the Library and Conservatory were the first two structures built on the grounds. Prominent civic leaders and financiers, including Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan, agreed to match the City’s commitment to finance the buildings and improvements.

Founded in 1899, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library is considered to be the largest, most comprehensive botanical library in the Americas. In addition to botany, horticulture, the Library’s collections are used for studies in fields as diverse as history, anthropology, landscape and building design, architectural history, ethnobotany, economic botany, urban social history, and environmental policy. In addition to current scholarly books and serials, the Mertz Library holds many rare, and historically important works ranging from medieval herbals, to 17th-century depictions of the princely gardens of Europe, to accounts of botanical exploration and discovery in the 18th century, to the writings of Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) and Charles Darwin.

The Library has been led by a series of accomplished individuals during its over 100 year history. Their names and dates of service are as follows:

• T. MacDougal (acting librarian, 1899)
• Anna Murray Vail (January 1900 – September 1907)
• John Hendley Barnhart (October 1907 – December 1912)
• Sarah Harlow (January 1913 – October 1937)
• Elizabeth C. Hall (November 1937 – 1960)
• James J. Daly, Administrative Librarian (1960–1961)
• Robert Jones, Administrative Librarian, 1962
• Mulford Martin, Acting Senior Curator of the Library (1964–1965)
• John F. Reed, Curator of the Library (1965–1971)
• Charles R. Long, Administrative Librarian (1972–1986)
• John F. Reed, VP for Education and Director of the Library (November 1992 – June 2003)
• Susan Fraser, Director of the Library (2004 – present)

The collection grew both through purchase of books and through the generous donation of significant botanical and horticultural libraries from notable botanists, gardeners, scientists and book collectors Among the important personal collections to be given to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library are donations from

• Eleanor Cross Marquand
• Sarah Gildersleeve Fife
• Lucien Marcus Underwood
• Robert Hiester Montgomery
• Emil Starkenstein
• John Torrey
• Harriet Barnes Pratt
• David Hosack

Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is a greenhouse located toward the western end of the NYBG. Inspiration for the park and the conservatory stemmed from Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth. The couple had visited the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew on their honeymoon and thought a similar park and conservatory should be built for New York City. The conservatory was designed by the major greenhouse company of the late 1890s, Lord and Burnham Co. The design was modeled after the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in Italian Renaissance style. Groundbreaking took place on January 3, 1899 and construction was completed in 1902 at a cost of $177,000. The building was constructed by John R. Sheehan under contract for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Since the original construction, major renovations took place in 1935, 1950, 1978, and 1993.

 

People : Tom Stuart-Smith, Garden Designer & Landscape Architect, Much More Than Oudolfs Sidekick …

Tom Stuart-Smith (born 1960) is an English landscape architect, garden designer and writer. He specialises in making gardens that combine naturalism and modernity.

Career

After working with Hal Moggridge and Elizabeth Banks Tom established his own landscape design business in 1998. Since 1984, Tom has designed a number of large private and public gardens in the English countryside as well as smaller inner city gardens, and numerous overseas projects throughout Europe, India, USA and Caribbean. His most notable work includes Broughton Grange (commissioned by Stephen Hester) in Oxfordshire, Mount St John in Yorkshire, Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park and a new garden at Windsor Castle which was commissioned by the Royal Household to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Tom was also involved with landscape designer Piet Oudolf in creating a Landscape Masterplan at Trentham Gardens and the recasting of its Italian garden. More recent work includes the two hectare garden around the Bicentenary Glasshouse at Wisley for the Royal Horticultural Society which was opened to the public by The Queen in June 2007. In 2013 Tom worked with Factum Arte to create a unique brass sculpture of an Ilex crenata tree for The Garden of Illusion at The Connaught^. Recently, he was also commissioned to create the Keeper’s House Garden at the Royal Academy of Arts. Tom has designed eight Gold Medal winning gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, with three being awarded best in show. An exhibition on his work, the first about a living garden designer in the UK, was held at the Garden Museum in London in 2011. He has also lectured in the UK and USA. Tom is a member of the Society of Garden Designers and the Landscape Institute

Early Life & Education

Tom was brought up in Hertfordshire on the Serge Hill estate. Four generations of Tom’s family have lived at Serge Hill since his grandfather bought the estate in 1927. After a degree in Zoology at the University of Cambridge he went on to study at Manchester University in 1982 to develop his research interests in landscape architecture and design. In 1986 Tom renovated a dilapidated barn and its surrounding fields into his new home, creating The Barn Garden at Serge Hill. In the summer of 2013, the first ever Festival of Garden Literature in the UK was held at The Barn Garden.

Writing

Tom has written articles for the Financial Times, Guardian and Telegraph on the subject of gardening and landscape design.

In 2011 Tom co-wrote and published a book titled ‘The Barn Garden

RHS : The Royal Horticultural Society, From Wedgewood To Chelsea …

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) was founded in 1804 in London, England as the Horticultural Society of London, and gained its present name in a Royal Charter granted in 1861. The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity and claims to be “the world’s largest gardening charity”.

The charitable work of the RHS helps to protect plants, gardens and green spaces. The RHS helps over two million school children to start gardening, supports gardening in more than 1,700 communities, and encourages people to grow their own food.

The charity promotes horticulture through flower shows such as the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, RHS Tatton Park Flower Show and RHS Cardiff Flower Show. It also supports training for professional and amateur gardeners.

History

Founders

The creation of a British horticultural society was suggested by John Wedgwood (son of Josiah Wedgwood) in 1800. His aims were fairly modest: he wanted to hold regular meetings, allowing the society’s members the opportunity to present papers on their horticultural activities and discoveries, to encourage discussion of them, and to publish the results. The society would also award prizes for gardening achievements.

Wedgwood discussed the idea with his friends, but it was four years before the first meeting, of seven men, took place, on 7 March 1804 at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly, London. Wedgwood was chairman; also present were William Townsend Aiton (successor to his father, William Aiton, as Superintendent of Kew Gardens), Sir Joseph Banks (President of the Royal Society), James Dickson (a nurseryman), William Forsyth (Superintendent of the gardens of St. James’s Palace and Kensington Palace), Charles Francis Greville (a Lord of the Admiralty) and Richard Anthony Salisbury, who became the Secretary of the new society.

Banks proposed his friend Thomas Andrew Knight for membership. The proposal was accepted, despite Knight’s ongoing feud with Forsyth over a plaster for healing tree wounds which Forsyth was developing. Knight was President of the society from 1811–1838, and developed the society’s aims and objectives to include a programme of practical research into fruit-breeding.

Royal Horticultural Society gardens

The Royal Horticultural Society’s four major gardens in England are: Wisley Garden, near Wisley in Surrey; Rosemoor Garden in Devon; Hyde Hall in Essex and Harlow Carr in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

The Society’s first garden was in Kensington, from 1818–1822. In 1821 the society leased part of the Duke of Devonshire’s estate at Chiswick to set up an experimental garden; in 1823 it employed Joseph Paxton there. From 1827 the society held fêtes at the Chiswick garden, and from 1833, shows with competitive classes for flowers and vegetables. In 1861 the RHS (as it had now become) developed a new garden at South Kensington on land leased from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (the Science Museum, Imperial College and the Royal College of Music now occupy the site), but it was closed in 1882. The Chiswick garden was maintained until 1903–1904, by which time Sir Thomas Hanbury had bought the garden at Wisley and presented it to the RHS.

RHS Garden Wisley is thus the society’s oldest garden. Rosemoor came next, presented by Lady Anne Berry in 1988. Hyde Hall was given to the RHS in 1993 by its owners Dick and Helen Robinson. Dick Robinson was also the owner of the Harry Smith Collection which was based at Hyde Hall. The most recent addition is Harlow Carr, acquired by the merger of the Northern Horticultural Society with the RHS in 2001. It had been the Northern Horticultural Society’s trial ground and display garden since they bought it in 1949.

Royal Horticultural Society shows

The RHS is well known for its annual flower shows which take place across the UK. The most famous of these shows being the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, visited by people from across world. This is followed by the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show (which the RHS took over in 1993) and RHS Tatton Park Flower Show in Cheshire (Since 1999). The most recent addition to the RHS shows line up is the RHS Show Cardiff, held at Cardiff Castle since 2005.^[5] The society is also closely involved with the spring and autumn shows at Malvern, Worcestershire, and with BBC Gardeners’ World Live held annually at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre.

Britain in Bloom

In 2002, the RHS took over the administration of the Britain in Bloom competition from the Tidy Britain Group (formerly and subsequently Keep Britain Tidy). In 2010, The Society launched ‘It’s your neighbourhood’, a campaign to encourage people to get involved in horticulture for the benefit of their community. In 2014, the ‘Britain in Bloom’ celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Education and training

The RHS runs formal courses for professional and amateur gardeners and horticulturalists and also validates qualifications gained elsewhere (e.g. at Kew Botanic Gardens).

The RHS Level 1 Award in Practical Horticulture aims to develop essential horticultural skills and to provide a foundation for further RHS practical qualifications at Levels 2 and 3. It is aimed at anyone who has an interest in plants and gardening.

Level 2 qualifications provide a basis for entry into professional horticulture, support career development for existing horticultural workers or can provide a foundation for further learning or training. There are separate theoretical- and practical-based qualifications at this Level and the RHS Level 2 Diploma in the Principles and Practices of Horticulture combines the theoretical- and practical-based qualifications.

Level 3 qualifications allow specialisation in the candidate’s area of interest. They can offer proficiency for those looking for employment in horticulture, they can support further career and professional development for those already working in the field, or they can provide a basis for continued learning or training. As for Level 2, there are theoretical- and practical-based qualifications at Level 3 and a Diploma that combines both.

The Master of Horticulture (RHS) Award is the Society’s most prestigious professional horticultural qualification. It is of degree level and it is intended for horticultural professionals. The course allows for flexible study over a period of three years or more.

Medals and awards

People

The society honours certain persons with the Victoria Medal of Honour who are deemed by its Council to be deserving of special recognition in the field of horticulture. Other medals issued by the society include the Banksian, Knightian and Lindley medals, named after early officers of the society. It awards Gold, Silver-gilt, Silver and Bronze medals to exhibitors at its Flower Shows.

The Veitch Memorial Medal, named after James Veitch, is awarded annually to persons of any nationality who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture.

Other awards bestowed by the society include the Associate of Honour and the Honorary Fellowship.

Plants

The Award of Garden Merit, or AGM, is the principle award made to garden plants by the Society after a period of assessment by the appropriate committees of the Society. Awards are made annually after plant trials.

Older books may contain references to the following awards, which were based mainly on flower quality (but which are not referred to in current (2014) RHS websites and reports):

PC: Preliminary Certificate

HC: Highly Commended

AM: Award of Merit (not the same as the AGM)

FCC: First Class Certificate (once a very prestigious award)

Royal Horticultural Society libraries

The RHS is custodian of the Lindley Library, housed within its headquarters at 80 Vincent Square, London, and in branches at each of its four gardens. The library is based upon the book collection of John Lindley.

The RHS Herbarium has its own image library (collection) consisting of more than 3,300 original watercolours, approximately 30,000 colour slides and a rapidly increasing number of digital images. Although most of the images have been supplied by photographers commissioned by the RHS, the archive includes a substantial number of slides from the Harry Smith Collection and Plant Heritage National Plant Collection holders.

The reference library at Wisley Garden is open to visitors to the Garden.

Publications

Journals

The society has published a journal since 1866. Since 1975 it has been entitled The Garden and is currently a monthly publication. The RHS also publishes both The Plantsman and The Orchid Review four times a year, and Hanburyana, an annual publication dedicated to horticultural taxonomy.

Plant registers

Since the establishment of International Registration Authorities for plants in 1955 the RHS has acted as Registrar for certain groups of cultivated plants. It is now Registrar for nine categories – conifers, clematis, daffodils, dahlias, delphiniums, dianthus, lilies, orchids and rhododendrons. It publishes The International Orchid Register, the central listing of orchid hybrids.

People : Dame Barbara Hepworth, Artist, Sculptor, Modernism and a St Ives Garden……..

Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She was “one of the few women artists to achieve international prominence.” Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St. Ives during the Second World War.

Early life

Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest child of Gertrude and Herbert Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, who in 1921 became County Surveyor. An upwardly mobile family, and a dominant father determined her to exploit fully her natural talents. She attended Wakefield Girls High School, and won a scholarship to and studied at the Leeds School of Art from 1920. It was there that she met her fellow student, Henry Moore. They became friends and established a friendly rivalry that lasted professionally for many years. Hepworth was the first to sculpt the pierced figures that are characteristic of works by both. They would lead in the path to modernism in sculpture.

Ever self-conscious as a woman in a man’s world, she then won a county scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1921 until she was awarded the diploma of the Royal College of Art in 1924.

Early career

Following her studies at the RCA, Hepworth travelled to Florence, Italy in 1924 on a West Riding Travel Scholarship. Hepworth was also the runner-up for the Prix-de-Rome, which the sculptor John Skeaping won. After travelling together through Siena and Rome, Hepworth married Skeaping on 13 May 1925 in Florence. In Italy, Hepworth learned how to carve marble from the master sculptor, Giovanni Ardini. Hepworth and Skeaping returned to London in 1926, where they exhibited their works together from their flat. Their son Paul was born in London in 1929.Her early work was highly interested in abstraction and art movements on the continent. In 1933, Hepworth travelled to France with Ben Nicholson, where they visited the studios of Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuşi. Hepworth later became involved with the Paris-based art movement, Abstraction-Création. In 1933, Hepworth co-founded the Unit One art movement with the artists Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson, critic Herbert Read, and the architect Wells Coates.[7] The movement sought to unite Surrealism and abstraction in British art.

Hepworth also helped raise awareness of continental artists amongst the British public. In 1937 she designed the layout for Circle: An International Survey of Constructivist Art, a 300-page book that surveyed Constructivist artists and that was published in London and edited by Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, and Leslie Martin.

Hepworth married the painter Ben Nicholson on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office, following his divorce from his wife Winifred. The couple had triplets in 1934, Rachel, Sarah, and Simon. Rachel and Simon also became artists. The couple would divorce in 1951.

St. Ives

Hepworth, her husband Ben Nicholson and their children first visited Cornwall at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Hepworth lived in Trewyn Studios in St. Ives from 1949 until her death in 1975. Hepworth said that “Finding Trewyn Studio was sort of magic. Here was a studio, a yard, and garden where I could work in open air and space.” St. Ives had become a refuge for many artists during the war. On 8 February 1949, Hepworth and Nicholson co-founded the Penwith Society of Arts at the Castle Inn; nineteen artists were founding members, including Peter Lanyon and Bernard Leach.

Hepworth was also a skilled draughtsman. After her daughter Sarah was hospitalized in 1944, she struck up a close friendship with the surgeon Norman Capener. At Capener’s invitation, she was invited to view surgical procedures and, between 1947-1949, she produced nearly eighty drawings of operating rooms in chalk, ink, and pencil. Hepworth was fascinated by the similarities between surgeons and artists, stating: “There is, it seems to me, a close affinity between the work and approach of both physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors.”

In 1950, works by Hepworth were exhibited in the British Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale alongside works by Matthew Smith and John Constable. The 1950 Biennale was the last time that contemporary British artists were exhibited alongside artists from the past.

During this period, Hepworth moved away from working only in stone or wood and began to work with bronze. Hepworth often used her garden in St. Ives, which she designed with her friend the composer Priaulx Rainier, to view her large-scale bronzes.

Death of son Paul

Her eldest son, Paul, was killed on 13 February 1953 in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand. A memorial to him, Madonna and Child, is in the parish church of St. Ives.

Exhausted in part from her son’s death, Hepworth travelled to Greece with her good friend Margaret Gardiner in August 1954.They visited Athens, Delphi, and many of the Aegean Islands.

When Hepworth returned to St.Ives from Greece in August 1954, she found that Gardiner had sent her a large shipment of Nigerian Guarea hardwood. Although she received only a single tree trunk, Hepworth noted that the shipment from Nigeria to the Tilbury docks came in at 17 tons. Between 1954-1956 Hepworth sculpted six pieces out of Guarea wood, many of which were inspired by her trip to Greece, such as “Corinthos” (1954) and “Curved Form (Delphi)” (1955).

Late career

The artist greatly increased her studio space when she purchased the Palais de Danse, a cinema and dance studio, that was across the street from Trewyn in 1960. She used this new space to work on large-scale commissions.

Hepworth also experimented with lithography in her late career. She produced two lithographic suites with the Curwen Gallery and its director Stanley Jones, one in 1969 and one in 1971. The latter was entitled “The Aegean Suite” (1971) and was inspired by Hepworth’s trip to Greece in 1954 with Margaret Gardiner. The artist also produced a set of lithographs entitled “Opposing Forms” (1970) with Marlborough Fine Art in London.

Barbara Hepworth died in an accidental fire at her Trewyn studios on May 20, 1975 at the age of 72.

Galleries holding her work

There are two major museums dedicated specifically to the art of Barbara Hepworth: the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St. Ives and the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

Her work also may be seen at:

• The University of Birmingham,
• Catherine’s College, Oxford,
• The School of Music at Cardiff University,
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, West Yorkshire
• Clare College,
• Churchill College
• Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), Cambridge
• Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk
• On the facade of the John Lewis department store, part of the John Lewis Partnership, on Oxford Street
• The Mander Centre, Wolverhampton (removed 2014)
• Kenwood House
• Outside the Norwich Playhouse
• On the grounds of Winchester Cathedral next to The Pilgrims’ School
• Leeds Art Gallery
• Tate Gallery
• Kröller-Müller Museum
• Pier Art Gallery in Stromness
• Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand

Marble portrait heads dating from London, ca. 1927, of Barbara Hepworth by John Skeaping, and of Skeaping by Hepworth, are documented by photograph in the Skeaping Retrospective catalogue, but are both believed to be lost.

Commissions

In 1951 Hepworth was commissioned by the Arts Council to create a piece for the Festival of Britain. The resulting work featured two Irish limestone figures entitled, “Contrapuntal Forms” (1950), which was displayed on London’s South Bank. To complete the large-scale piece Hepworth hired her first assistants, Terry Frost, Denis Mitchell, and John Wells.

From 1949 onwards she worked with assistants, sixteen in all. One of her most prestigious works is Single Form,[36] which was made in memory of her friend and collector of her works, the former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, and which stands in the plaza of the United Nations building in New York City. It was commissioned by Jacob Blaustein, a former United States delegate to the U.N., in 1961 following Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash.

Controversy

On 20 December 2011, her 1969 sculpture Two Forms (Divided Circle) was stolen, from its plinth in Dulwich Park, South London, suspicions are that the theft was by scrap metal thieves. The piece, which had been in the park since 1970, was insured for £500,000, a spokesman for Southwark Council said.

One of the edition of six of her 1964 bronze sculpture, Rock Form (Porthcurno), was removed from the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton in the spring of 2014 by its owners, The Royal Bank of Scotland and Dalancey Estates. Its sudden disappearance led to questions in Parliament in Sept. 2014. Paul Uppal, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West said: “When the Rock Form was donated by the Mander family, it was done so in the belief it would be enjoyed and cherished by the people of Wolverhampton for generations… It belongs to, and should be enjoyed by, the City of Wolverhampton.”

Recognition

Hepworth was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1959 Sāo Paolo Bienal She also was awarded the Freedom of St. Ives award in 1968 as an acknowledgment of her significant contributions to the town. She was awarded honorary degrees from Birmingham (1960), Leeds (1961), Exeter (1966), Oxford (1968), London (1970), and Manchester (1971). She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1965. In 1973 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Following her death, her studio and home in St. Ives became the Barbara Hepworth Museum, which came under control of the Tate in 1980.

In 2011, the Hepworth Wakefield opened in Hepworth’s hometown of Wakefield, England. The Museum was designed by the famed architect David Chipperfield.

• 

List of selected works

1928	Doves
1932–33	Seated Figure
1933	Two Forms
1934	Mother and Child
1935	Three Forms
1936	Ball Plane and Hole
1937	Pierced Hemisphere 1
1940	Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)
1943	Oval Sculpture
1943–44	Wave
1944	Landscape Sculpture
1946	Pelagos
	Tides
1947	Blue and green (arthroplasty) 31 December 1947
1949	Operation: Case for Discussion
1951	Group I (Concourse) 4 February 1951
1953	Hieroglyph
1954–55	Two Figures
1955	Oval Sculpture (Delos)
1955–56	Coré
1956	Curved Form (Trevalgan)
1956	Orpheus (Maquette), Version II
	Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II
1958	Cantate Domino
	Sea Form (Porthmeor)
1959	Curved form with inner form – anima
1960	Figure for Landscape
	Archaeon
1961	Curved Form (Bryher)
1962–63	Bronze Form (Patmos)
1963	Winged Figure
1963-65	Sphere with Inner Form
1964	Rock Form (Porthcurno)
	Sea Form (Atlantic)
	Oval Form (Trezion)
1966	Figure in a Landscape
	Four-Square Walk Through
1968	Two Figures
1969	Two Forms (Divided Circle)
1970	Family of Man
1971	The Aegean Suite
	Summer Dance
1972	Minoan Head
	Assembly of Sea Forms
1973?	Conversation with Magic Stones

People : Dr D G Hessayon, The Gardener, Author Who Made Us All Experts & Is The Most Published Garden Writer Of All Time ….

David Gerald Hessayon (born 1928) is a British author and botanist of Cypriot descent who is known for a best-selling series of gardening manuals known as the “Expert Guides” under his title Dr. D. G. Hessayon. The series started in 1958 with Be Your Own Gardening Expert and in 2008 the celebrated their 50th anniversary and the 50 millionth copy in print. They have become the best selling gardening books in history.

Early life

Hessayon is the son of a Cypriot landowner and grew up in Salford, England. He gained a Bachelor of Science degree in botany from Leeds University. In 1950, he travelled to the United States where he worked as the editor of a small town newspaper. In 1953, he went to Ghana as a Research Fellow at the University College before returning to Manchester to obtain his doctorate in soil ecology. In 1955, he accepted a position as chief scientist with Pan Britannica Industries Ltd(PBI), becoming chairman in 1972. It was here Dr. Hessayon formulated the idea for his “Expert” guides to gardening.

The “Expert” guides

A steady stream of publications followed the initial Be Your Own Gardening Expert, each maintaining the basic formula of down-to-earth writing with pictures, charts, and photographs. On the British bestsellers list for the 1980s, two Experts were in the Top 10. There are (as of 2009) over 20 “Expert” titles in 22 languages and in Britain their sales continue to dominate the gardening paperback lists. The Vegetable & Herb Expert continues to be the best seller.

Recognition

In 1993, he received the first-ever Lifetime Achievement award at the British Book Awards. He was also awarded The Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society for his contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture. In 1999, he was awarded a Guinness World Records certificate for being Britain’s “bestselling non-fiction author of the 1990s”.

Despite a resolve to stay out of the limelight, he has received further awards- a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Garden Media Guild, three honorary doctorates and, in 2007, an OBE. In 2012 he was included in the Daily Mail list of “60 truly great Elizabethans” for “teaching millions of us how to garden”.

People : Monty Don, Gardener, Designer & Artist, From Costume Jewellery to Jewel Garden….

Montagu Denis Wyatt “Monty” Don (born 8 July 1955) is an English television presenter, writer and speaker on horticulture, best known for presenting the BBC television series Gardeners’ World.

Early life

Monty Don was born in Berlin, to British parents, Denis T. K. Don, a career soldier posted in Germany, and Janet Montagu (née Wyatt). Both parents died in the 1980s. Don has a twin sister, an elder brother David, and two other siblings. His twin suffered a broken neck in a car crash, aged 19.

Both his paternal grandmother and grandfather were Scottish, through whom he is descended from the Keiller family of Dundee, inventors of chip marmalade in 1797. Meanwhile, on his maternal side, he is descended from the Wyatts, who were a prominent dynasty of architects.

Don was educated at three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, Hampshire, Bigshotte School in Wokingham, Berkshire, and at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, a college he hated. He then attended a state comprehensive school, the Vyne School, in Hampshire. He failed his A levels and while studying for re-takes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer. He determined to go to Cambridge out of “sheer bloody-mindedness”, attending Magdalene College, where he read English and met his future wife Sarah.

Career

In the 1980s, Don and his wife formed a successful company that made and sold costume jewellery under the name Monty Don Jewellery. The collapse of the company in the early 1990s prompted him to embark on a career in writing and broadcasting. He has written about the rise and collapse of their business in The Jewel Garden, an autobiographical book written with his wife. “We were lambs to the slaughter and we lost everything, […] we lost our house, our business. We sold every stick of furniture we had at Leominster market,” he wrote. He was unemployed from 1991 to 1993.

Don’s first TV work came as the presenter of a gardening segment on breakfast show This Morning. He featured as a guest presenter for the BBC’s Holiday programme. He went on to present several Channel 4 land and gardening series: Don Roaming, Fork to Fork, Real Gardens and Lost Gardens, and wrote a regular weekly gardening column for The Observer between February 1994 and May 2006. Don had never received formal training as a gardener. He commented, “I was – am – an amateur gardener and a professional writer. My only authority came from a lifetime of gardening and a passion amounting to an obsession for my own garden.” He is a keen proponent of organic gardening and the practice of organic techniques, to some extent, features in all of his published work. The organic approach is most prominent in his 2003 book The Complete Gardener.

Don was the main presenter on BBC Two’s Gardeners’ World from 2003 to 2008 succeeding Alan Titchmarsh. He was the first self-taught horticulturist presenter in the show’s 36-year history, stepping down only after suffering a minor stroke. After viewing figures for Gardener’s World fell below two million for the first time in 2009, in January 2010, changes were announced to the programme in an attempt to entice viewers back. In December 2010, it was announced that Don would be returning to the programme as lead presenter for the 2011 series, replacing Toby Buckland. Reaction to the announcement was divided on the programme’s blog. Since March 2011 he has been presenting the programme from his own garden (called Longmeadow) in Herefordshire.

Don featured in the BBC programme and book, Growing out of Trouble, in which several heroin addicts manage a 6-acre (24,000 m²) Herefordshire smallholding in an attempt at rehabilitation. He also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens (BBC Two 27 January – 30 March 2008) and in December 2008, narrated a programme about the cork oak forests of Portugal, for the BBC’s natural history series Natural World. He presented My Dream Farm, a series which helped people learn to become successful smallholders (Channel 4, January 2010) and Mastercrafts, a six-part series for BBC Two, which celebrated six traditional British crafts. He has twice been a panellist on the BBC’s Question Time (February 2009 and March 2010) and his family history was the subject of the fourth programme in the seventh series of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? (August 2010). In April 2011 Don presented Italian Gardens, a four-part BBC2 series which was accompanied by the publication of a book.

In late 2008 Don became President of the Soil Association and is a Patron of Bees for Development Trust.

In 2013, Don presented an episode of Great British Garden Revival.

Personal life

Don and Sarah married in 1983 and have three children. The couple lived in Islington, North London while Don pursued postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, worked as a waiter at Joe Allen restaurant in Covent Garden and later as a dustman, and completed two unpublished novels. Meanwhile Sarah trained as a jeweller.

Don has written of his struggle with depression since the age of 25 and Seasonal Affective Disorder. He describes in his memoir “great spans of muddy time” in which there is nothing but depression. He noted “‘Earth heals me better than any medicine”. He has had cognitive behavioural therapy and took Prozac before favouring a lightbox, now a recognised aid for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers. He had peritonitis in 2007 and a minor stroke in 2008.

He lives near Ivington, Herefordshire, England, and has lived in Herefordshire for over 20 years.