Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 24th May 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £25
Location: Online

Packed with colour and pattern, interior designs vie with brightly coloured bedding schemes, and artificial flowers inside reflect artifice outside. Rich fashion fabrics are resolutely plain, but do the corsets and constrictions, bustles and flounces mirror the contrivances and deceptions in the garden where topiary and carpet bedding entertain? Inside and out are brought together in the middle-class home where ‘taste’ rules all. Fifth part in a monthly series examining the interplay of textiles, fashion, culture, and garden design. Each session is sold separately.

Tutor: Sally Francis
Date: Tuesday 25th June 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £35
Location: Classroom

Find out about the history of this fascinating flower and how to use it in your cookery at home. Saffron is the dried stigmas of an autumn-flowering crocus called Crocus sativus. It is a hugely valuable spice with a fascinating history. Saffron is used around the world to flavour food as well as being used for dyeing, perfumery and in herbal medicine. On this half-day course Sally will introduce you to the history of the cultivation of this fascinating flower and teach you how to get the best from this precious spice in your cookery at home.

Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 28th June 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £25
Location: Online

As the ‘wild garden’ gained popularity outside, textiles and fashion reflected looser more ‘natural’ fashions inside. Flowers decorated hats and house parties, whilst sports for all dictated both clothing and landscapes, as tennis courts and croquet invaded the country house landscape. ‘Allotment fashion’ appears on postcards and down the plot, and women in bloomers bicycled to Tea Gardens laid out in fashionable rustic style. The sixth and final part in our chronological monthly series examining the interplay of textiles, fashion, culture, and garden design will include the influence of sport and leisure on landscapes and fashions. Each session is sold separately.

Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 20th September 2024, Friday 25th October 2024, and Friday 22nd November 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £105
Location: Classroom

This short series of three linked sessions will each explore in detail distinct artists/artistic schools which drew for inspiration on gardens, garden design and planting, but impacted in different ways on textiles, fashion, and culture more broadly. Focusing mainly on the English experience but including in the first session a pairing of English and Spanish (Sargent and Sorolla) with further reference to French impressionists in England. The aim of these sessions is to explore the ways in which gardens and design integrate into other aspects of culture and arts by focusing on specific examples.

Tutor: Nathan Smith
Date: Monday 14th October 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £25
Location: Online

A history of science course that will cover how mycology came to be recognised as a subject. Covering the 19th and early 20th century, the course will give an overview of the key events in the early history of mycology and will explore topics such as the history of the microscope, the history of scientific societies, and the role of museums. Participants will also be guided through available resources enabling them to conduct further reading and, if they desire, their own research into this underexplored topic.

Tutor: Laura Mayer
Date: Wednesday 16th October 2024
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £25
Location: Online

The architect and designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, born in 1716, is credited with formulating the iconic English landscape garden. Even today, his rolling lawns, scattered with tree clumps and ornamented with glittering lakes, continue to define our perception of rural Britain. As a result, his hundreds of landscapes have eclipsed the study of eighteenth-century garden history almost entirely. But how many of those schemes were genuinely Brown’s sole vision? And when we look at the man behind the name, what, in fact, was his true ‘capability’? This course examines, possibly controversially, that it was not just his aesthetic insight – nor even his practical gardening talents – that set Brown apart from his peers, but something entirely more mercenary.