Report from the Chairman

December saw the departure of Jon Kenny who leaves us to join his first love Archaeology. Jon has guided the project through its early stages and we are grateful to him for his enthusiasm and wish him well in his new venture. We were fortunate in being able to recruit Rachael Sturgeon as Project Manager to replace Jon Kenny, and even more fortunate in that she was able to join us early in December.

Rachael joins the team at a crucial period in the project as we start the software development with our appointed contractor, Altcom. Rachael brings with her extensive experience in managing complex projects to a successful conclusion and we have every confidence that she will provide the necessary drive and leadership that the project requires at this stage. Rachael will be introducing herself elsewhere within this newsletter.

During the same period we have recruited two further members of staff, Sarah Jackson as Editor and Susan Gordon as Writer. We were most impressed with the capability and experience of those who applied for these posts and it was a hard choice for the interviewing panel to make. We welcome these new members of the team and hope that they will enjoy working on this exciting project.

I am acutely aware that many members of the County Gardens Trusts have been waiting patiently for this project to unfold, none more so than myself since I was involved with David Jacques, Jenny Burt and Sarah Rutherford in making the original submission to the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2000, and have personally followed every step through the negotiations with the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I can assure you that your patience is about to be rewarded and within a few months we will be in a position to demonstrate to you the capabilities of the database. The long delay in preparing for the software development contract has been necessary in order that

we assured ourselves that the functional specification was sufficiently detailed and comprehensive. Soon we will be looking to the County Gardens Trusts to work with us to populate the database.

Peter Lindesay
Chairman
Parks and Gardens Data Partnership




Report from the new PM

I’d like to thank everyone for such a warm welcome to the project. I think I have hit the ground running since joining in December. This is a very exciting and busy time in the project as we are finalising the details of the database and content management system as well as working out the design of the website Home page. In the near future we will be reviewing and approving the functional specifications of the software which will then allow Altcom to enter the next stage of the project- building the systems. I am very pleased now to have our Writer and Editor on the team. Both Susan and Sarah started in January and are jumping right in. John Warden and I are currently recruiting for our Data Entry staff and have already received a wealth of extremely qualified applicants. We plan to interview in late February and have them in place shortly thereafter. It won’t be long before we will be ready to launch the system and begin the next big phase of the project- entering information. Our Volunteer Coordinators are working hard in their regions to communicate the specifics of the project, set up workshops for skills training, get current volunteers started on new site research and recording projects and recruit as many new volunteers as possible to contribute to the project. We have a lot of ground to cover in terms of information gathering and would like to involve as many people as possible in this great effort. I look forward to meeting members of the community as this project continues to unfold.

Rachael Sturgeon
Project Manager
Parks and Gardens UK

NEW FACES ON THE TEAM

RACHAEL STURGEON
Project Manager
rs549ATyork.ac.uk

Rachael Sturgeon, a native Californian, has been living in York for the last 2 ½ years while her husband is working on his PhD at the University of York. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology and Art History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating, Rachael spent three years working as an intern for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History where she worked on exhibits of natural history prints by artists such as Bodamer, Catlin, Audubon, Besler, Lear and Redouté. Her editing background and strong project management experience stems from her work within the higher education publishing sector at Thomson Learning. On a personal level, Rachael has always held a strong interest in gardens and parks, and specifically with regards to the fields of plant identification, botanical illustrations, and archaeology.

SUSAN GORDON
Writer
sg552ATyork.ac.uk

Dr. Susan E. Gordon is the newly appointed Writer for Parks & Gardens UK. For the last five years she has been an Assistant Professor of Art History and co-founder of the Centre for British Studies at Harlaxton Manor, Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her research interests are in the use of sculpture, classical iconographies and mythology in designed landscape and the English country house. Susan took her PhD at the University of Bristol, where she was Servandoni Scholar in Architectural History. Subsequently she held a research fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and a Leverhulme fellowship at the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Centre. Prior to joining Harlaxton in 2002, Susan worked for Bristol City Museums, both as an Assistant Curator and volunteer, and served as a visiting lecturer on the Garden History MA at Bristol. When not based at Harlaxton, Susan lives in South Wales and often visits the US from whence she originates. She is very much looking forward to working on the Parks and Gardens UK project.

SARAH JACKSON
Editor
sj534ATyork.ac.uk

Sarah Jackson is the newly appointed Editor for the Parks & Gardens UK. She has worked for many years in PR and marketing for the higher education and voluntary sectors, following a degree in English at Leicester University. More recently, she has completed courses in horticulture, landscaping and garden design at Capel Manor College, and the Diploma of Garden History from Birkbeck College, University of London. In addition to her new responsibilities at with the project, Sarah is also completing work on a two-year HLF-funded project for the London Parks & Gardens Trust to develop their annual flagship event, Open Garden Squares Weekend. This has involved recruiting a large number of new sites to the event, producing a range of publications to promote London’s many and varied historic green spaces, and improving the operational management to increase the sustainability of the event.

From Folly to Fishpond… and back

When Cambridgeshire Gardens Trust invited us to help in researching and recording gardens of Huntingdonshire we immediately became aware of our folly in undertaking such an enormous task. The Trust collates information not only for garden historians, but also to assist in conservation, protection of the environment and planning issues such as road building and housing development. While gardening books may be second only to cookery books as Christmas presents, our parents’ gardens are disappearing as fast, ironically, as home cooking, with the extensive grounds of nineteenth century villas being converted to executive cul-de-sacs and manicured ‘front’ gardens being laid to gravel and tarmac for car standing. Working, therefore, on the basis that the most recent history is the most easily lost, our Huntingdon NADFAS Garden History Group decided to look at significant gardens of any size and period.

Home and Garden inspired by the 1922 Ideal Home Exhibition.
Photo courtesy of the Owner.

Our selection of gardens may be guided by their association with well known people, such as the ownership of the Manor House at Fenstanton with Capability Brown or a garden at Hemingford Grey with the children’s writer, Lucy Boston. In some gardens we have been able to find a particularly interesting conjunction of architecture and garden: in one instance a house built to a design from the 1922 Ideal Home Exhibition, with vestiges of its contemporary garden and ten acres of arboretum and woodland, currently being lovingly restored. We study specific kinds of gardens such as cemeteries, municipal and institutional gardens, and use historical maps to detect the evolution of landscape features such as avenues of trees of former boundaries and water features. The narrow-necked ‘ponds’ issuing onto the River Ouse sent us rifling through the records of Ramsey Abbey for evidence of fish husbandry. But our most exciting resources are the ledgers of a local nursery of world wide repute, Wood and Ingram, which traded continuously from 1741 to 1950.

Members of the Huntingdon DFAS Garden History Group with the ledgers of
the Wood and Ingram Nursery (1741-1950)
and the fruit of the Maclura pomifera “Osage Orange”
rescued from our trip to the Cambridge Botanic Garden, December 2005.

The accounts indicate not only spending patterns and fashions in particular plants, such as hedging in periods of enclosure, most vigorously in our area from 1761-1801, but also the origins of particular specimens. In the rectory garden of one local village grows an ‘Huntingdon Elm’ ulmus x ‘Vegeta’ sold by Wood and Ingram and listed by them as a stock plant. They had obtained this particular hybrid as seed from the Earl of Sandwich, gathered in near-by Hinchingbrooke Park. John Ingram also gave a specimen to J.C. Loudon (the garden encyclopaedist) in 1836. On top of all this is the chance to network ! Our group enjoys many study days and outings to neighbouring Botanic Gardens, Cambridge Colleges and documented historic gardens such as Lyveden New Bield and Childerley Hall. So even if you don’t have a major undocumented historic garden waiting to be ‘unearthed’, take up the challenge. You may find that a local contemporary garden, like that of the architect Peter Foster O.B.E. with its Greek Temples and Classical colonnades designed and constructed by himself, will reveal your own folly well worth pursuing.

One of the many temples designed by Peter Foster O.B.E.
who delights in the creation of follies. This example from 1955
uses six Doric columns rescued from a Regency shop front
in near-by St Ives. Photo courtesy of Peter Foster OBE.

Judith Christie
Huntingdon Decorative and Fine Arts Society

THE ROLE OF THE VOLUNTEER COORDINATORS

The role of the Volunteer Coordinators is fundamental to the project. In the last newsletter we introduced the five, newly appointed, Volunteer Coordinators: Lucy Hand, Leslie Johansen-Salters, Patricia Shepherd, Caroline Palmer and Elizabeth Chalstrey. Each coordinator has been assigned a region, organised by county, for which they are responsible. They report directly to the Communications Coordinator and meet on a monthly basis with the Project Manager and Communications Coordinator. In their roles, the Volunteer Coordinators will serve as a main point of contact for volunteers in their region and provide communications support for the development team based at The King’s Manor in York. Having specialised local representatives for the project is vital, as the coordinators will also strive to provide a connection between the efforts of volunteers within County Gardens Trusts as well as other organisations, such as National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies, within their regions.

The Volunteer Coordinators have already begun to establish connections with the various organisations within their regions and are meeting with interested groups to explain the history and progress of the project thus far and how to become involved. They have already been proactive in providing feedback from meetings and relaying any questions or concerns that individuals within organisations may have to the core team in York. The Volunteer Coordinators are also working toward identifying Information Coordinators within each organisation to serve as a main point of contact. Please note that anyone who is not involved with a County Gardens Trust or organisation, but would like to be involved with the project, should please contact their Volunteer Coordinator directly, or contact the core team in York. Contact names and addresses are provided below.

Over the next few months, the Volunteer Coordinators will be working hard on recruiting and registering volunteers, identifying areas where skills and training are needed and organising training workshops for volunteers who will be researching and recording sites for the project. The coordinators are also working with the Communications Coordinator in the development of a Training Manual, which will provide detailed materials and tools related to the project as well as guidance on how to research and record sites.

The Volunteer Coordinators themselves have a great understanding of and are highly qualified in Garden History. They are extremely dedicated to the project, willing to contribute their knowledge and expertise, and are therefore of great value to the future of the project.

LIZ CHALSTREY echalstreyATwaitrose.com
Avon, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire,
Isle of Wight, Somerset, Surrey and Wiltshire

LUCY HAND loocyhATyahoo.com
Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, London, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.

LESLIE JOHANSEN-SALTERS ljs124ATyork.ac.uk
Cheshire, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Northumbria, Nottinghamshire,
Shropshire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire

CAROLINE PALMER caroline-palmerATtiscali.co.uk
Welsh Historic Gardens Trust

PATRICIA SHEPHERD pmshepherdATaol.com
Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hereford & Worcester, Kent,Leicestershire & Rutland, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex.

EVENTS

Lectures at University of Leicester
14 February 2007
Centre for the Study of the Country House
‘A Few Very Fine Things and a Vast Deal of Tiresome Stuff’ Women and the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century.
Professor Rosemarie Sweet, Leicester
7 March 2007
‘Craftsmen and Labourers:
The Unsung Heroes in the History of the Country House’
Professor Richard Wilson, East Anglia
Drinks reception at 6.30pm
Lectures 7.00pm in the Great Hall
Cost each £10
Tickets: Mrs Carol Charles: cec7ATle.ac.uk
_____________

Thursday, 22 March 2007
AGT Research Lectures,
at Swedenborg Hall, Holborn, London at 2.00pm
Jennifer Meir:
'Sanderson Miller and his Landscapes' and
Michael Symes:
'The Picturesque and the Sublime'
Contact: Kate Harwood:
agt@gardens-trusts.org.uk

Tuesday 15 May 2007
Study Day at Rufford Abbey
Leicestershire & Rutland Gardens Trust
‘Rufford Revealed: The History of the Gardens from Cistercian utility to Edwardian Opulence’. Cost £30
Contact: Lucy Alcock, Rufford Country Park, Ollerton, Newark, Nottinghamshire NG22 9DF
Tel: 01623 821313.
E-mail: lucy.alcockATnottscc.gov.uk

August
(date and time to be arranged)
AGT/BGT Study Day
in Buckinghamshire - maybe at Hartwell.
Contact: Kate Harwood:
agtATgardens-trusts.org.uk

If you have an event which you would like us to include in future editions of
Parks & Gardens News
or if you would like any further information do please contact:
Helen Lazenby: 01904 433950 or
e-mail: hl523ATyork.ac.uk

The Association of Gardens Trusts