Humphry Repton (1752–1818) ambitiously styled himself Capability Brown’s successor: the century’s next great improver of landed property. Developing a new aesthetic, which he termed ‘Ornamental Gardening’, his landscapes were laced with flowers and crammed with exotic features. Immortalized in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, Repton turned his hand to everything from ghoulish garden mausoleums to George IV’s seaside palace, Brighton Pavilion.
Keeping a sketchbook is the best habit an artist can have. The more you draw from reality the easier it will be to develop your own style and compositions. Discover fun methods to develop your sketching in Cambridge Botanic Garden with illustrator Karin Eklund. Using the garden and Glasshouses as our starting point, Karin will give creative prompts to get you started and introduce new materials and techniques throughout the day. Looking carefully at plants and drawing from observation will be our starting point, gradually introducing elements of imagination, memory and found materials.
Essential oils extracted from plants are a rich source of medicinal compounds that are harnessed in aromatherapy. This course will introduce aromatherapy and essential oils, look at some of the commonly used oils and explore the plants they come from. We will see how these oils are obtained and used and how you can be sure that you’re getting the oil you expect. Weather permitting, we’ll also visit some of the essential-oil providing plants which grow in the Garden.
Yellow is notoriously difficult for the botanical artist to portray, without the end result looking ‘dirty’ because of the use of greys for shadows. With Janie’s help you will explore the possibilities of using anything but grey to produce good shadows on yellow flowers. You will be shown how to apply a first layer of soluble pencil/watercolour quite quickly to colour the whole subject. Once dry, oil or wax-based pencils will be used over this to create amazing illustrations and add finesse and detail. The end result is an illustration as good as any done with pure w
Join tutor Emma James on this two day workshop to print your own sketchbooks. After collecting fallen leaves and natural materials from the Garden, you will learn different printmaking techniques by combining plant materials and creating layered prints by printing onto cotton rag and assorted papers. Experiment with masks and ghost prints to create individual and subtle images inspired by plants and vistas from the gardens.
During the three days you will look at the structure of the flowers and draw them first before painting them in watercolour. Instruction will be given on mixing appropriate colours. There will be a variety of plants with different structures and colours taken from the collection grown at the Botanic Garden. The seed heads are also lovely to draw and the plants have striking dark green leaves. The course is open to students of mixed abilities, and who have painted before.
Using works from the Fitzwilliam Museum collection, this online talk will explore how Western European religious painting was embraced and transformed by women and queer artists working in the 19th and 20th century in Britain. The talk will initially focus on 19th Century responses to Renaissance representations of Saint Sebastian: in a context in which queer life was strictly policed and driven underground, paintings of Saint Sebastian became symbols of hope, figures of queer possibility, deviant desire made radiantly visible. It will then explore the portraiture of Gwen John.
Whether you are looking to green up your grass or tackle pests and weeds, we can provide a step-by-step action plan for everyone. This half-day session will include a practical demonstration as well as a tour of the Garden’s show lawns with our expert greenkeeper Adrian Holmes. You will learn the main principles of maintaining your lawn all year round. The course aims to give you the knowledge and confidence to grow a lawn that is the envy of your neighbours.
The wonderful world of scientific nomenclature has embedded a ‘secret’ history of plant hunters and horticulturalists in the plants and flowers we grow in our gardens. The honour of naming a new species was taken by many as an opportunity to honour past heroes or current friends, but the temptation of having one’s own name go down in history was often too much to resist, especially after a lifetime of ‘derring-do’ plant hunting with little other reward. Markedly different from the naming of cultivars, we will encounter few from outside of the closed world of plants.
Saffron is the dried stigmas of an autumn-flowering crocus called Crocus sativus. It is a hugely valuable spice with a fascinating history. Saffron is used around the world to flavour food as well as being used for dyeing, perfumery and in herbal medicine. On this half-day course Sally will introduce you to the history of the cultivation of this fascinating flower and teach you how to get the best from this precious spice in your cookery at home.
