Tutor: Charlot King
Date: Tuesday 22 September 2026
Time: 10 am - 1 pm
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 storytelling skills.

Tutor: Nic Wilson
Date: Wednesday 22 April 2026
Time: 10 am - 4 pm
Cost: £80
Location: Classroom


Are you inspired by gardens and plants? Do you enjoy reading about how others engage with these external domestic spaces and how they relate to our lives, our pasts, our futures? Perhaps you want to write about your own experiences in a garden or discuss the ways that plants feature in different styles of garden writing. Led by an experienced writer and teacher, this course involves exploring short pieces connected to plants and gardens. You’ll have the opportunity to experiment with some of the themes and linguistic techniques identified and to use plants in the Botanic Garden as inspiration for your own creative pieces.

Tutor: Gwenda Kyd
Date: Thursday 23 April 2026
Time: 10 am - 1 pm
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom


Samuel Hahnemann harnessed the healing effects of animals, vegetables and minerals. This course will focus on his plants, looking at what we know about their beneficial properties today. Some of the plants are commonly used in medicine but others are so poisonous that they have found only limited use. And the toxicity of a few has led to their misuse to harm people rather than heal them. Weather permitting, we’ll visit some of Hahnemann’s herbs which grow in the Garden.

Tutor: Laura Mayer
Date: Friday 12 June 2026
Time: 6 - 8:30 pm
Cost: £30
Location: Online


During the first part of the eighteenth century, the garden underwent a gradual transformation from geometric formalism to pastoral Arcadian idyll. This shift in landscaping style mirrored the political, intellectual and stylistic revolutions of the century, as authoritarianism was rejected in favour of something looser and more natural. Yet this complex and fascinating period of British garden history is frequently raced through, in a bid to reach the perceived apex of the style, and the minimal designs of Lancelot Brown and his contemporaries. This lecture focuses on the early informal landscape, and considers the fledgling ‘rural gardening’ style and ferme ornée promoted by men like Philip Southcote and Alexander Pope. It highlights the ingenuity of Stephen Switzer, who believed that the extortionate upkeep of geometric, axial designs could be solved simply by laying the whole country open to view. This notion ultimately transformed the way landscape was viewed forever, and encouraged every designer from Batty Langley to William Kent to embrace informality and build increasingly less structured gardens.

Tutor: Laura Mayer
Date: Monday 14 December 2026
Time: 6 - 8:30 pm
Cost: £30
Location: Online


The aesthetic category known as the Picturesque developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Defined by the artist and travel writer William Gilpin as ‘that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, it was equally applicable to art, architecture and even music. In the case of British landscape, the Picturesque aesthetes championed a Romantic appreciation for rugged and sublime topography. Through their writings, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight harnessed a growing disdain for the minimal landscapes of Brown and his contemporaries, instead encouraging Picturesque values of irregularity and wildness. This lecture grapples with the paradoxes inherent in a movement which championed unbridled naturalism through the artificial lens of taste, whilst recognising the early role of the Picturesque writers in championing wilderness preservation.