The Gardens Trust is taking its education programme online. While lockdown might be easing a little, it’s clear that some restrictions are going to be with us for a long time to come. So, while we hope to run visits and study days in the future, for now we are moving as many of our educational activities as possible online, including lectures, courses and our well-established conservation training programme.
Our online programme begins on 23 June with a light-hearted look at the history of the garden gnome followed by a weekly series of Lockdown Lectures through to the end of July. Meanwhile, we are busy planning the programme for the rest of the year. While we all know this approach can’t provide the nice social interaction that accompanies a meeting ‘in real life’, it does have some advantages. There’s no travel, you can have a coffee whenever you want, and we can attract a wide range of speakers from all over the country, and perhaps from overseas too.
Free garden history talks
These lectures are free but we welcome donations towards our campaigning to protect historic parks and gardens. Dr David Marsh is giving the lectures pro bono and we would like to thank him for taking up the challenge of both organising and giving our first series of online lectures.
The Trust’s events and education programme brings in between £10k and £20k annually as income for the Gardens Trust. That might not sound much in the great scheme of things but it’s a big chunk of the funds we need to pay for our staff. Without it we either have to cut back on the work we do, or borrow from our precious reserves, which we also rely on to provide us with a regular revenue stream.
Tuesdays at ten and Wednesdays at six
Each lecture will be given on a Tuesday morning and repeated at 6pm the following day. We’re going to be using the professional version of Zoom which is well tried and tested and seems to operate with few technical hitches. The only thing you’ll need to do is download the basic free version of zoom onto your computer, tablet or mobile phone. Once you’ve booked you will be sent the link to log in to the session a couple of days before the lecture.
We hope you will join us either on Tuesdays at 10am or on Wednesdays at 6pm to enjoy David Marsh’s live lectures which will be as entertaining as they are well researched. The topics of his talks are:
23/24 June: Little Men in Red Hats: The History of the Garden Gnome
30 June/1 July: Castles for Cows & Palaces for Poultry: Garden buildings for animals
7/8 July: What made our gardens grow?
14/15 July: Tools of the Trade: a history of garden tools
21/22 July: The Elephant in the Garden and other beastly encounters
28/29 July: Garden history in the making? The story of my garden
Gardens Trust online education
The first Gardens Trust online education courses will be starting soon, with an Introduction to Garden History coming in August followed by a course on the History of Plants. The Historic Landscape Project have already supplied online training resources to County Garden Trusts and are planning to run online events by the end of the summer. Watch the Gardens Trust events page for more details.
