The fifth in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of The Gardener’s Magazine takes place May 20 at 1 pm Eastern.

It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’

In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.

Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realize how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.

Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. Tickets to the May 20 session may be purchased through Eventbrite HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.

This talk reconsiders John Claudius Loudon as not only an eminent landscape gardener and encyclopaedist, but as a visionary urban thinker. Through analysis of his publications and his design for Gravesend Terrace Gardens, it will explore the meanings of the Gardenesque – a style which Loudon evolved and defined over the course of his career. The aesthetic and reformist ideals underpinning this unique approach to landscape design help frame his macro-scale response to the anxieties of the industrial city, which took the form of a radical plan in his 1829 Gardener’s Magazine. Loudon’s prescient proposal, which imagined London growing in alternating, concentric zones of town and country, arguably deserves a place in the lineage of Green Belt thinking. Gardenesque Urbanism, as presented here, perhaps represents an overlooked approach to the reconciliation of urban growth with the innate human affinity for open space.

Patrick Smith is an architectural designer at IID Architects – a Richmond-based practice which specializes in the education sector. He previously studied Sculpture at Central Saint Martins, and then Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge, he became interested in landscape theory and its intersection with urban design. For his research into the work of John Claudius Loudon, he was awarded the 2025 Mavis Batey Essay Prize by the Gardens Trust.