Other Voices in Garden History - Guns and Roses

The first in a 10-part lecture series, celebrating the voices beginning to be heard, online once a week on Mondays at 6 pm.

This series of illustrated lectures will explore the impact and legacy of empire, colonialism and enslavement on western garden and landscape history. Our aim is to bring back some of the voices usually absent from this history, to identify and fill gaps in our collective knowledge, and to explore new ways of engaging with the whole history of gardens, landscapes and horticulture.

The landscape gardener, Humphry Repton’s working life witnessed great social change. He disliked the new money men connected with trade and commerce, but reluctantly benefited greatly from these bankers, industrialist and merchants who profited from war and colonial contracts. The profits of empire percolated through the whole of the British economy and funded the creation of many gardens and landscapes of aspiration. This lecture looks at Humphry Repton’s work for the Quaker gun manufacturer Samuel Galton Junior at his estate at Warley Woods, Birmingham.

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Garden, Plant and Social Historian Advolly Richmond is an independent researcher based in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK. She is a trustee of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and she sits on the Gardens Trust Events and Education Committee. Through her Royal Horticultural Society training and qualifications she went on to achieve an MA in Garden History from the University of Bristol. A member of the Garden Media Guild, she is a television presenter on BBC Gardener’s World and a contributor to BBC Gardener’s Question Time. She lectures on a variety of 16th to 20th century subjects and is currently researching the life and achievements of the Anglo-African Victorian botanist the Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman (1809 – 1890).