Talk by Timothy Walker on Science and Colour in English Garden Design

Timothy Walker

How contemporary work by artists such as Turner, Monet, Rothko, Jackson Pollack evolved in parallel with ideas about what a garden should look like. In 1882 the gardener Gertrude Jekyll wrote a seminal article urging gardeners to “remember that in a garden we are painting a picture”. As an accomplished watercolour artist, she was familiar with the principles of using colours, but she believed that in gardens these principles had been neglected. This talk looks at how to apply these principles in designing a border, but it also looks at the ways in which a border is different from a painting.

Timothy Walker read Botany at University College Oxford. After graduation, he worked at gardens including the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, and the Oxford Botanic Garden which won four gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show under his directorship and was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its provision of imaginative educational programmes. A Master of Horticulture and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society, he presented a three-part film series on the history of botany on BBC4. Since 2014, Timothy has been a tutor in Plant Biology at Somerville College, Oxford.