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Historic Gardens and Landscapes of England Project Study Day
Bristol, Saturday 8 March 2008
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‘Leaping the Fence’: Transitions between Garden and Landscape in the Chinese and European Traditions -Symposium in collaboration with Dumbarton Oaks
Burwalls Conference Centre, Bristol, 18 to 20 April 2008
Horace Walpole remarked memorably of the English landscape designer William Kent: ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. Yet the desire to establish a relationship between the enclosed and the unfettered – ‘garden’ and ‘landscape’ – has been a recurrent aspect of man’s encounters with nature across many cultures and over many different periods of history. Such general categories as ‘nature’, ‘enclosure’ and indeed the ‘garden’ are indeed free-floating concepts which need to be tethered down in accordance with the particular culture and context that may be under discussion.
This symposium focuses on two very different traditions, the Chinese and the European. In both cases, there are social, cultural and poetic factors, as well as purely physical barriers, that define the enclosure of land, and these serve to mediate the contrast between the garden and the wider landscape. Motion through the landscape, whether on foot or with the comforts of modern tourism, creates a exploratory momentum that transcends the static view. Mountains, rather than merely serving as a backdrop to the garden enclosure, are brought within their compass both in the form of representative rocks and through the poetic fictions of the garden owner. Traditions which lay store by the notion of the garden as a retreat from the world also offer a means of engaging with the practical issues of agriculture.
Click here for further information and details of how to book
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Thomas Wright and Halswell Study Day
Halswell House, Wednesday 14 May 2008 Who was Thomas Wright (1711-86) and where can we still see evidence of his extraordinary designs? How is the ‘lost’ eighteenth-century designed landscape at Halswell in Somerset linked to Thomas Wright? Are some of the surviving structures in the landscape inspired by Wright’s drawings or copied from structures in other gardens? Or did Wright actually design the garden buildings himself, specifically for Sir Charles Kemys-Tynte (1710-1785) the owner and creator of these unique gardens?
Click here for further information and details of how to book
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Click here to read a review of last year's Annual Conference on the Aesthetic Garden
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