The Subtle Science & Exact Art of Colour in English Garden Design – Why Gardening can Rank as a Fine Art – Timothy Walker
Event type(s):
- Talk/
Starts: Sat 12th Jul 2025 14:00
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.
Timothy’s talk will explore how to apply these principles when designing a border but also examine the
ways in which a border is different from a painting. Timothy will go further and demonstrate how the
work of artists including Turner, Monet, Rothko and Jackson Pollack evolved in parallel with ideas
concerning what a garden or border should look like.
Lecturer, botanist, gardener and author, Timothy Walker is the former Horti Praefectus and Director of
Oxford Botanic Garden and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London.
