The Subtle Science and Exact Art of Colour in English Garden Design
In 1882 Gertrude Jekyll wrote a short but seminal article in The Garden in which she urged the readers to “remember that in a garden we are painting a picture”. As an accomplished watercolour artist, Miss Jekyll was familiar with the principles of using colours, but she felt that in gardens these principles “had been greatly neglected”. This talk looks at how to apply these principles in designing a border, how a border is different from a painting and also how the work of Turner, Monet, Rothko and Jackson Pollack evolved in parallel with ideas about what a garden or border should look like.
Timothy Walker, who from 1988 to 2014 was director of the Oxford University Botanic Garden, has lectured extensively about the collections, a ‘living museum’. His lectures investigate the relationship between science and art, which meet on equal terms in gardens.
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