Just in case you missed me in action ...

All events - talks, lectures, and courses whether online, live or on a cruise can be repeated. The title may remain the same but the content is adjusted each time for the audience.

This lecture for the Australian Garden History Society explored gardens of the Impressionists from three continents – Europe, North America and Australia - enjoying the essentially similar pleasures of the garden but engaging with the light from their skies in order to create very different sensations. 

The Alnwick Garden showcases traditional and cutting edge designs. Green leaves serve many potent functions who would have thought of lettuces and Traveller’s Joy as harbingers of dangerous intoxication. Fenced, walled and gated, lies The Poison Garden where I devised a fatal attraction of plants.  

As a starter ... in the words of Virgil 'Had I a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,

A voice of iron, I could not count the types

Of fool, nor yet enumerate the names

Of every kind of folly.' 

The Impressionist Garden and arguably the most famous. Available on Livestream 

https://viking.tv/live/monday/explore-claude-monets-life-in-giverny-with-guest-lecturer-caroline-holmes  

We will examine the material outcomes in every sense of the Arts and Crafts Movement founded on rural and historic ideals of human skill, launched in the 1880s to counter Britain’s industrialisation.  For full details:  https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/course/beauty-and-utility-arts-and-crafts-houses-and-gardens-0

Lucretius What is food to one, is to others bitter poison. Examining the toxic in intoxication - Socrates and hemlock, mandrake in the Bible, Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling. Virginian Gold, 007 in You only Live Twice, and 'The Poison Garden' https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/course/fatal-attraction-darker-side-plants-

1.  Impressionists in their gardens - living light and colour 

2.  Around the world in three years with Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks 

3.  Keats and Regency domestic gardens, 1795-1821