Friday 31 May 2024
6.00pm: Registration (for those who have booked for dinner)
6.30pm: Dinner
7.45pm: Registration (for those who have not booked for dinner)
8.00pm: Simon Hiscock, title to be confirmed
9.15pm: End of day
Saturday 1 June 2024
8.00am: Breakfast (residents only)
9.00am: India Cole, 'The Duchess of Botany: Mary Somerset’s botanical collecting, cultivating, and curating c.1680-1715'
This talk will examine the botanical and horticultural legacy of Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (1630-1715). Somerset’s gardens (at Beaufort House in London, and at Badminton, her stately home in Gloucestershire) were renowned for their horticultural accomplishment; and her monumental herbarium and florilegium are testaments to her botanical acumen.
10.00am: Clare Hickman, 'Esteemed for eminent skill in his profession: gardeners and botanic collections in late Georgian Britain'
Expert gardeners were crucial in the creation, maintenance and use of botanic collections and performed roles as scientific technicians in the University garden as well as managers of private scientific gardens. This talk will explore their centrality to a range of eighteenth-century activities, from the teaching of botany to domestic botanic collecting, with examples from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and from private gardens owned by medical practitioners.
11.00am: Coffee/tea
11.30am: Sharon Willoughby, 'Prisms and palimpsests: new voices and hidden histories in botanic gardens'
The modern botanic garden has many roles, operating as a scientific research and collecting organisation, a pleasure garden offering a place of connection to the natural world and public institution engaged in the quest to create botanically rich and sustainable futures. If we peel back the layers, it is possible to see that gardens concentrate, reflect and refract the ideas of the peoples that created and visit them - framing places of meaning and memory. These storied landscapes and living plant collections have many tales to tell but whose voices and which stories do we hear and how will traversing this complexity help us navigate the modern world?
12.30pm: Break
12.45pm: Depart for tour of Oxford Botanic Garden
Packed lunches are provided for those who have booked and paid for them in advance. Please bring your own packed lunch if you wish, and outdoor footwear suitable for walking and clothing for all weathers.
4.30pm: Arrive back at Rewley House (approx.) - free time until dinner
6.30pm: Dinner
8.00pm: Lindsay Sekulowicz, 'Pigment and earth: ethnobotany and art in the northwest Amazon'
As an artist, Lindsay uses drawing and ceramics to work collaboratively with Indigenous communities of the Northwest Amazon. Through investigations of clay, pigments derived from plants and material processes, her work generates new insights into historical and biocultural collections, and considers the way that knowledge is transmitted over time. In this discussion she will explore how artistic practice can be a tool to engage with Indigenous cosmovisions.
9.15pm: End of day
Sunday 2 June 2024
8.00am: Breakfast (residents only)
9.00am: Caroline Cornish, 'Convicts, Vagrants and Luantics: Captive Labour and the Botanic Garden'
The infamous role of slavery, and slavery’s successor, indentured labour, in the history of economic botany is well documented. From the 17th to the 20th century, and from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to the rubber plantations of SE Asia, cheap labour was an integral element in the imperial botany formula. However, in this talk, we consider other forms of captive or coerced labour – including prisoners, ‘lunatics’, and orphans - who were deployed in the creation of items in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. Taking an object-based approach we will look at who was involved, and how, and what this can tell us about economic botany as it evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.
10.00am: Seamus O’Brien, 'Historic and modern plant hunting for Kilmacurragh'
The talk will trace the story of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, Kilmacurragh from a monastic settlement to the arrival of the Acton family in the mid 17th century and the creation of a great estate. This includes the laying out of a formal Dutch park, later replaced by a wild-style garden in the 19th century. Planted during the heyday of the great plant hunters, Kilmacurragh was abandoned following the Great War, and has been restored with recent travels to Chile, China and Tasmania to restock the gardens.
11.00am: Coffee/tea
11.30am: Sarah Edwards, 'Ethnobotany: plants, peoples & perspectives'
Ethnobotany first developed as a formal academic discipline in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, initially concerned with ‘discovering’ plants of economic value used by Indigenous peoples. Since then, Ethnobotany has evolved as an interdisciplinary field that draws on elements across the social and natural sciences, studying the dynamic interactions and interrelationships between plants and people as mediated through culture. Today ethnobotanists work collaboratively and equitably with local peoples to conserve biocultural diversity. This talk will explore how as a bridge between different traditions and disciplines, Ethnobotany can offer us unique insights to help address the current ecological crises.
12.30pm: Break/bar opens
12.45pm: Lunch and course disperses
