MERL Lunchtime Seminar: March 10: All around is Fairy ground

All around is Fairy ground: Pleasure and the Regency garden Professor Timothy Mowl FSA, Professorial Research Fellow in History of Architecture & Designed Landscapes, University of Buckingham • 10 March In his richly illustrated lecture, Timothy Mowl will explore gardens, including Lord Blandford’s Whiteknights, which were characterised by exuberant formal parterres, jewelled island beds of graduated flowers, frothy basket-work borders, shrubberies laced with flowers and over-arching trellises covered with rambling roses, jasmine and clematis. Their lawns were enamelled with spring bulbs, enlivened with elegant vases, strewn with Chinese barrels for casual alfresco seating, cut with reflecting oval pools backed by specimen shrubs and dramatised by deep-delved grottoes. Every pleasure ground had its meshed aviary and pheasantry, there were fountains with writhing dolphins, rustic garden seats, thatched and pebbled-floored, Swiss-style bridges, greenhouses and conservatories overflowing with exotics. These flowery paradises were readily accessed from the house via ground-length sash windows, tree-trunked verandahs entwined with climbers and conservatories arcing out from the house into the garden. By day they were ablaze with colour and by night, lit by coloured lamps hanging from the trellises and the trees, they sparkled and glittered.

Suitable for
Not suitable for children

Admission
Frre. Just come along. For more information email merlevents@reading.ac.uk or phone 0118 378 8660

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//se000391?id=EVENT516604