HISTORIC GARDENS OF SOMERSET - by Professor Timothy Mowl
Wednesday 26th May 2010 - 10.30 for 11.00am Lecture - Admission Free
Halswell cordially invite you to attend a lecture given by renowned historian Professor Timothy Mowl of Bristol University. Tim is currently researching the historic gardens of England and has already published nine books on counties ranging from Staffordshire to Cornwall. His next book in the series, which will be published on 11th May, is on Somerset. His richly illustrated lecture will present some of the county's most extraordinary gardens, many of which are privately owned, and the people who created them.
The illustrated lecture will commence at 11am with morning coffee served from 10.30am in the Bow Room. This is a complimentary lecture but numbers are limited so please book your place by calling the Halswell booking office on 0845 204 1066
Historic Gardens of Somerset
Somerset is still a county of deep-delved country lanes, textured manor houses and small market towns, which remains agrarian, patrician and refreshingly old-fashioned. Apart from the National Trust's Montacute, it is not rich in Elizabethan or Jacobean gardens, but what the county lacks in early gardens it more than makes up for in a brilliant cluster of eighteenth-century landscape circuits set around the Quantocks at Halswell, Hestercombe, Fyne Court and Crowcombe. Friendly aesthetic rivalry there resulted in a range of exotic garden buildings including a Witch House, a Robin Hood Temple and a fake medieval convent of recycled stone. Later in the century Humphry Repton was commissioned to draft Red Book proposals for new gardens at Newton Park, Leigh Court and at Ston Easton, and as nearby Bath continued to develop, towered and belvedered Italianate houses rose from conservatoried gardens filled with ornamental flowerbeds. Meanwhile, around Frome, wealthy industrialists built troglodytic grottoes at The Chantry, Hapsford House and Pondsmead at Oakhill, while a more earnest, religious propaganda underpinned the Bone Caves under the hill at Banwell. Artists and intellectuals of the elite group of the Souls haunted the walled enclosures at Mells Manor, where Norah Lindsay laid out a dreamy, flower-filled garden. But the greatest expression of that pre-First World War period of weekend parties and aesthetic longeurs is the series of Edwardian garden rooms at Barrow Court. They are as characteristic of Somerset as the Vale of Avalon with its sentinel Tor, Glastonbury's own Chalice Well Garden and the 1990 stone circle at Michael Eavis' Worthy Farm. It is a county where New Age spiritualism chimes perfectly with a reverential nostalgia for an England that never was.
