Friday 6th June 2025 at The Henley Rugby Club. 10.00am - 3.00pm. (Booking Thursday 17th April 2025). Cost £45.00. Coffee from 10.00am. First Lecture 10.45am - 11.45am. Second Lecture 12.00pm - 1.00pm. Sandwich lunch 1.00pm - 2.00pm. Third Lecture 2.00pm - 3.00pm approximately. Free parking. For more information on all Special Interest Days please contact Diana Jones on diana.jones@btinternet.com or 0118 947 8762 / mobile 07799 661 459.
Timothy Walker
This three-hour study day looks at the use of colour in gardening and fine art, and proposes that garden borders and contemporary paintings have evolved along parallel lines in the past 150 years. Along the way these talks look at the relationship between fine art and gardening and science.
Humans began painting with colour at least 44,000 years ago in a cave in Indonesia. As more colours became available the artists took them up, so for example we see blues appearing in Egyptian tombs.
We do not see colour becoming important in garden design in England until the end of the 18th century, despite the fact that Nature had already produced myriad colours to use. Prior to this gardens were monochrome with green dominating the landscape. This appears to be true in gardens from England to China. Gardens in England finally became truly multicoloured under the influence of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1923) who was herself inspired by the work of JMW Turner.
(Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
Through the 20th and into the 21st century we see gardeners become increasingly interested and confident in the application of colour in their borders. Paintings and herbaceous borders differ in a number of ways, but they have to obey the same laws of chemistry and physics and “colour theory” applies equally to them both. Using this theory gardeners such as Penelope Hobhouse, Sandra & Nori Pope, Piet Oudolf, and James Hitchmough, have created borders that can “rightly claim to rank as fine art”, as suggested by Jekyll in 1882.
The influence of Mark Rothko is explicit in some of these borders, but there appears to have been a subliminal influence for other artists such as Jackson Pollock. The final section of this study day looks at how you might create a border in your garden that can be considered to be a work of art.
Oxford Botanic Garden
Timothy read Botany at University College Oxford. After graduation, he worked as a trainee at Oxford Botanic Garden, The Savill Garden Windsor, and The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. In 1985 he was awarded a Master of Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society of London. From 1988 to 2014 he was director (Horti Praefectus) at the Oxford Botanic Garden. Between 1992 & 2000 the OBGHA won four gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show London. In 2009 the Botanic Garden was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for providing imaginative educational programmes for adults, students, children, and the general public, thereby breathing new life into education for people of all ages and enriching their lives.
In 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. In the same year he presented a three-part series of films on the history of botany on BBC4. Since 2014 he has been a tutor in Plant Biology at Somerville College, Oxford.
