The last in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of The Gardener’s Magazine takes place May 27 at 5 am Eastern. Register 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.
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 realise how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.
The final session of the series will bring together two experts on the Loudons and the nineteenth-century garden for what promises to be a fascinating discussion. They will debate the distinctive contributions and importance of the Loudons, their legacies viewed from a twenty-first century perspective and take questions and comments from the audience.
Dr Brent Elliott was formerly the Librarian of the Royal Horticultural Society. For 21 years he was a member of the Historic Parks and Gardens Advisory Committee of what was then English Heritage and has been a member of the Victorian Society’s Buildings Committee for over 45 years. He was also a former editor of Garden History. He is the author of Victorian Gardens (Batsford, 1986) and of various subsequent works on garden history. His book The British Cemetery, co-authored with Roger Bowdler, will be published in April.
Dr Sarah Dewis is the author of The Loudons and the Gardening Press (Routledge, 2014). She completed her doctorate at Birkbeck University of London. She contributed to The Lure of Illustration in Nineteenth Century Picture and Press (Palgrave and Macmillan, 2009) and to the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Academia Press, 2009). With Brent Elliott she co-edited the six-volume collection, Nineteenth-Century Gardens and Gardening (Routledge, 2024).
