FOT Lecture Series IV: Restoring English Gardens and Researching Eighteenth-Century Plant Materials Dr. Mark Laird

Professor Mark Laird will discuss why researching eighteenth-century plant materials involves a different methodology from that used by architectural conservators investigating interior ornamentation. He will illustrate, by example of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, that in 2010, unlike the paints and plasterwork of the interiors, the vegetative remnants of Walpole’s gardening were non-existent. Visualizing how to restore Walpole’s vanished groves and shrubbery to the period 1747-1797 involved using textual and pictorial archives, supported by a fund of plant-material studies that began in the early 1980s with Laird’s replanting Charles Hamilton’s Painshill Park, Surrey, to its glory days 1738-1773. Mark Laird’s 40-year work for Painshill Park Trust also leads him to consider the place of women in Georgian gardening. By comparing the paltry wages paid to “weeder women” to the huge prices paid for a single Magnolia grandiflora from South Carolina, he arrives at some arresting conclusions. He will end by reviewing Professor Roderick Floud’s 2019 Economic History of the English Garden. Floud’s findings – that, put in 2020 money values, “Hamilton was paid well over £60 million from public funds for doing very little” — prompts a complementary proposition: that expenditure on plant-material-based restoration is today’s way of reclaiming assets for huge public benefit.

Register Now