Berkshire
Gardens Trust
Reg.Charity No.1201501

Nancy Lancaster: From Interior Design to Garden Design

by
Richard Bisgrove
Monday, 21st November at 2pm

We are very pleased to welcome back Richard Bisgrove to give the last of our talks this year.  Richard first introduced us to Nancy Lancaster in April last year in his talk on Gardening Across the Pond: Anglo-American exchanges of horticultural knowledge and plants from the early settlers in Virginia through to prairie gardens in 21st century England.

 

Nancy Lancaster, formerly Nancy Perkins /  Field / Tree, and a niece of Lady Astor of the Waldorf Astor estate at Cliveden, was a poor little rich American who taught the English upper classes good taste. Married three times (she said she was better at choosing houses than husbands) she modernised and furnished three English houses and created the gardens around them. Richard will give us a brief summary of her eventful life and describe the gardens she made.

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Nancy’s hat (right) is held at the Garden Museum, London.   As a gardener Nancy Lancaster delighted in bright colours, saying that ‘as long as there was enough green, anything went’. Yellow was a favoured colour and friends remember her in the garden in the depths of winter wearing a bright yellow hat. Examples of her gardens can be seen at her former homes; Dichley Park in Oxfordshire and Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire.

 

Richard Bisgrove is a retired Course Director in Landscape Management at the University of Reading, and author of several books on garden design and garden history including his most recent publication, Gardening Across the Pond, in 2018. Richard has been a member of BGT since we first started in 2010. He continues to lecture, encouraging a better and contemporary understanding of garden history and kindly provided the accompanying photos.

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Booking: Please book online before the 20th November. The tickets are £5 each. Non-members welcome. We will send you a Zoom link for the lecture a few days beforehand. The lecture will last approximately 1 hour, followed by questions.  We will let you know whether the lecture will be recorded with the link available for a week to those people who have booked for the event. 

 

Queries: Kim Hacker at BerksGTmembership@gmail