Travelling through the seasons we will explore the history, folklore and culture of three wild plants in bloom (or at least in foliage!) that month. The session will encourage you to search out plants in all seasons and enjoy the history in folklore and culture, and their use for medicines, cooking as well as the many and varied traditional names which help us trace that history.

Session 1: Sat 21 Jan, Session 2: Sat 4 Feb, Session 3: Sat 18 Feb, Session 4: Sat 4 Mar, Sat 5: Sat 18 Mar

Join Paul Herrington, who will share his top tips and skills to help you to make a start designing your own garden. Across five sessions you will explore design principles, ideas and inspiration, simple surveying and scale drawing, planning for the right plant in the right place as well as developing a layout plan for your own garden and how to ensure year round structure and interest.

Museums like ours contain specimens that belonged to scientific heroes such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed the answers to the question of how species evolved. Their stories have been well told; however, they did not work alone. What’s often missing from the histories are the countless local and Indigenous experts who contributed so much to our understanding of the natural world, by collecting specimens for the likes of Darwin and Wallace.

Join us for a talk that explores how Western European religious painting was embraced and transformed by women and queer artists working in 19th and 20th century Britain. The talk relates to works from the Fitzwilliam collection.

This talk will also be livestreamed - if you would prefer to join us online, please go to our separate booking page

From late 13th and early 14th century, the Akan people of southwestern Ghana and southeastern Ivory Coast developed a weighting system to measure gold dust, which was the form of currency. Beyond their transactional use, the importance of goldweights lies in their ability to communicate the multifaceted cultural practices and worldview of the Akan people, but also the underlining systems and structures they created.