C20 Garden part 2 - Icons of Twentieth Century Garden Design
Icons of Twentieth Century Garden Design with with writer and garden historian Katie Campbell
Soon after the First World War, Britain’s garden designers attempted to create new styles to reflect the new age. Rejecting the fusty certitudes of the past, they combined industrial materials with modern aesthetics to create unique, distinct and often startling new spaces. Inspired by modern architecture, Jungian psychology, avant-garde art and contemporary politics they reinterpreted established horticultural traditions in striking new ways; from Sylvia Crowe’s novel - but award winning - 1936 Concrete Garden at Chelsea, to Christopher Tunnard’s abstract English landscape at Bentley Wood; from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s bellicose ‘philosopher’s garden’ at Little Sparta to Derek Jarman’s provocative ‘shaggy paradise’ on the barren Kent coast; from the massive modern earthworks Kim Wilkie inserted into eighteenth century landscape at Boughton to Charles Jencks’ perplexing Garden of Cosmic Speculation with its horticultural metaphors representing cutting edge theories of cosmogenesis, these designers pioneered new approaches and established new meanings for twentieth century gardens.
Time: 10:00 BST
