Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 27 March 2026
Time: 10 am - 1 pm
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom


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 third 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 30 January 2026
Time: 10 am - 1 pm
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom

Muslins and cottons, prints and sprigs, influences from India and the growth of merchants. We will explore links between parks and parades of spa towns, Reptonian gardenesque for the newly monied classes, aviaries and exotics for the Regent. Portraits and conversation pieces give us insights into clothing and landscape, as polite society dictate fashion inside and out as literature joins the cultural milieu.

First part in a monthly series examining the interplay of textiles, fashion, culture, and garden design. Each session is sold separately.

Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Friday 27 February 2026
Time: 10 am - 1 pm
Cost: £40
Location: Classroom

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.

Second part in a monthly series examining the interplay of textiles, fashion, culture, and garden design. Each session is sold separately.

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: Alley Marie Jordan
Date: Thursday 12 March 2026
Time: 6 - 8:30 pm
Cost: £30
Location: Online

This course will cover classicism in eighteenth-century gardens as Enlightenment thinkers sought to bring Antiquity into their landscapes. This lecture-based course will look at historic gardens from the classical perspective in order to better recognise the ancient gods in the garden and to more fully understand why certain plants were selected, why artificial mounds were built, and why grottoes were so popular. Classical trends in philosophy, art and horticulture will be explored so that you can consider eighteenth-century gardens via the historical lenses through which they were meant to be viewed. We will examine classical features in gardens and to discern their meaning, from mythology to references to Roman politics. For many gardens, like Rousham in Oxfordshire, visitors were meant to move through the garden as you would read a Roman poem, each new classical feature revealing a new classical meaning. Thus, such landscapes were infused with a classical intimacy not immediately visible to today’s visitors.

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.

Tutor: Nic Wilson
Date: Thursday 19 March 2026
Time: 10 am - 4 pm
Cost: £80
Location: Classroom


Would you like to write about your life in the garden, with plants or in the local landscape? Or perhaps you’re partway through a memoir, but need some help with structuring or developing it? This course will explore the narrative structure and style of garden and nature life writing, using published memoirs to inspire our own creativity. The morning session will focus on analysing and discussing life writing extracts and short writing exercises. In the afternoon, there’ll be more time to write and discuss any questions, concerns, aspirations and ongoing projects individually with the tutor. The final part of the course will focus on writing non-fiction proposals for agents and publishers, which also helps develop narrative structure, even if you’re not writing for publication.

Tutor: Twigs Way
Date: Saturday 27 June 2026
Time: 10 am - 4 pm
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.