Tutor: Sally Francis
Date: Tuesday 24th June 2025
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom

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: Saturday 5th July 2025
Time: 10:00 - 16:00
Cost: £80
Location: Classroom

Taking the ‘long view’ on the garden’s relationship with nature this one-day course will reach back into garden history, before turning to examine the present-day contexts and future issues within which we garden. Encompassing discussion of the cross-over between visions of historic landscape and gardens within movements of ‘romanticism’, ‘picturesque’, and ‘wild’, we will go on to examine understanding and usage of modern terms including ‘wildlife friendly’, ‘re-wilding’ and, crossing to land management, ‘regenerative’. We will also consider the impact of changing climate and disease patterns, and managing the balance between past, present and future visions of heritage gardens,landscapes and current design.

Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 19th September 2025, Friday 17th October 2025 and
Friday 14th November 2025
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £120
Location: Classroom

This exciting series of three sessions will explore the interplay between fashions in garden design and planting, textiles, fashion and culture more broadly. Focusing on the English experience but including the influence of trade and contacts more widely, we will use both images and texts to explore this cultural interplay between inside and out, chronologically in monthly sessions, commencing with the Medieval and Early Tudor and running through Elizabethan and Early Georgian.

Tutor: Charlot King
Date: Tuesday 23rd September 2025
Time: 10:00 - 13:00
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom

Plants have featured heavily in fiction, whether celebrating their beauty or being used to poison in murder mysteries! This course will celebrate murderous plants in a selection of stories. From Shakespeare’s plays to Colin Dexter’s Morse, and in between, we will explore deadly plants featured, as well as some story-telling skills.

Tutor: Laura Mayer
Date: Wednesday 26th November 2025
Time: 18:30 - 20:30
Cost: £30
Location: Online

Humphry Repton (1752–1818) ambitiously styled himself as Capability Brown’s successor: the century’s next great improver of landed property. Developing a new aesthetic, which he termed ‘Ornamental Gardening’, his landscapes were laced with flowers and crammed with exotic features. Immortalized in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, Repton turned his hand to everything from ghoulish garden mausoleums to George IV’s seaside palace, Brighton Pavilion. His famous Red Books – illustrated to help his clients visualize the potential of their properties – did much to encourage an appreciation of landscape aesthetics during the Regency period. This course will trace his career from its picturesque beginnings to the progressive Gardenesque style, which both made his name and changed England’s relationship with nature forever.