Cotswold Manors and Gardens

The Cotswold hills with their mellow stone cottages, elegant manor houses and imposing castles contain some of the most important historic gardens in England. A virtual history of English gardens can be found in Gloucestershire, parts of Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire. Although little survives of the Roman and medieval periods, some very early gardens remain: Thornbury Castle and Horton Court are two remarkable early 16th century gardens. From the 17th century, the restored gardens at Westbury Court are well known, while ghosts of the late 17th-century gardens at Dyrham Park are more challenging to discover.

The 18th century is represented in the poetic garden at Rousham, William Kent’s best surviving landscape, as well as in Capability Brown’s most famous garden at Blenheim Palace. Quirkier examples of the English landscape are found at Painswick and Sezincote.

Modern gardens, too, are impressive: the Arts and Crafts garden at Snowshill and especially Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote Manor, which became a model for so many later garden designs. This lecture covers the history of the English garden, using both famous and little-known gardens, all set in the most unspoiled part of England.

Paula Henderson

Paula Henderson has degrees in art history (University of Chicago, M.A.) and Ph.D. in architectural history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London). She lectures widely in Britain (where she lived for 43 years) and the United States and has published over seventy articles on English Houses and their settings. Her first book, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the 16th and 17th Centuries (published by Yale University Press), won the Berger Prize for the outstanding contribution to the history of British art 2005. Treehouses (co-authored with Adam Mornement) was published by Francis Lincoln, also in 2005. She is currently completing books on London gardens in the age of Shakespeare and on the Landscape as Art.

She taught courses for the Courtauld Institute of Art Institute Art for many years and, most recently for the V& A Museum. She has lectures for the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, the Architectural Association, both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Birkbeck College, Christie’s Education, The Inchbald School of Design, the V&A Museum, the Tate Gallery, The Garden History Society, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Sotheby’s Educational Studies, and many others. She led tours for the Courtauld Institute to Florence (‘Gardens of the Medici’) Debyshire (‘Elizabethan Architecture’) and the Cotswolds (‘Gardens of the Cotswolds’). While living in England, she also traveled to the United States to lecture for the Society of Architectural Historians, The Garden Club of America, The Royal Oak Foundation, and the Williamsburg Institute. She is a Fellow of Society of Antiquaries of London and now splits her time between Nantucket, MA and Williamsburg, VA.

Thursday, April 18 | 6:00 p.m. (ET) Reception following
The General Society Library, 20 W. 44th Street, NYC (Bet. 5th and 6th)