I joined CGT in 2002 having accidentally fallen into a Garden Design course and discovering the garden modules of the ACE History of Art Diploma; quite a change after Oxford Jurisprudence, practising as a solicitor and raising a family in France and the USA. CGT is compulsive, giving me the opportunity to meet exciting people, enjoy the thrill of visiting new gardens and of researching local and national history through the lens of plantsmen and garden designers. Now and again, it even inspires me to wrest forth a modicum of fruitfulness from my own patch of the impressively fertile Fens.

I am a CGT founding member who has always been inspired by the high quality of its publications – the regular newsletters and occasional volumes. These have helped me appreciate a county which I never previously considered to have remarkable landscape or numbers of notable gardens (I was brought up in Dorset).  Having recently retired as an Architect specialising in historic buildings, my knowledge and interest in their surrounding gardens and landscapes is integral for understanding their evolution and significance. I now have time to develop my own garden and to visit many more. Reading about them is not enough.

My gardening genes come from my grand-father, an Audley End gardener who later laid out a Jekyll garden at Townhill Park, Hampshire. After a Wye College BSc, my Cambridge PhD examined the public use of private land for outdoor recreation. My post-doctoral research studied the impact of hedge removal when they were being grubbed up wholesale. Maternal duty led to a course in Garden Design, where I found my skills lay in soft landscaping. My husband of 48 years died four years ago after a long illness but life continues with my youngest son and his wife producing my first grand-child.

My gardening interests come via my grandfather’s allotment and my parents’ garden-gate sales of strawberries and chrysanthemums. An OU graduate and an Associate Lecturer in Business Studies, I gained an MSc from Leicester University while with Anglian Water. Once retired, Cambridge ICE courses in Garden History were followed by an Advanced Diploma dissertation on parks and public health. A previous Secretary to Huntingdon in Bloom, I volunteer in Hinchingbrooke Hospital’s gardens, play piano and classical guitar, and am discovering painting in acrylics (pictures not walls). A former CoM member, I’m enjoying being involved once again.

As a student I studied history of art and architecture and have always loved visiting historic buildings and gardens. In 2000 my husband and I moved to a house with a well stocked garden and I decided I should really able to name the contents. Since then, and following retirement from my work in education in 2012, I have been on an ever-steeper learning curve, though one I have relished with increasing enthusiasm. We now tend a much larger garden with space for ornamentals, fruit, vegetables and trees, managed with wildlife in mind. Being a member of CGT has brought together two of my great loves and I have found the visits, lectures and company of like-minded people extremely rewarding and enjoyable.

A career in design, including gardens, culminated in a rather late Master’s in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research, London University. My particular interest is in the post-war landscapes of cooling towers, motorways and coal mines and their effect on a previously rural society. I have always delighted in creating green spaces wherever I have lived and opened my previous garden in London under the National Gardens Scheme for many years. I now find myself living surrounded by Trumpington’s numerous springs and wells, in a house built rather alarmingly on old Coprolite mines.

After a biology degree, I joined the British Library as a curator working with the modern life sciences collections, before helping to plan for services in the BL’s new building at St Pancras. I then developed strategies with the creative industries to enhance their use of the BL’s collections. My interest in garden history and design was reinforced by an Open College of the Arts certificate in the Art of Garden Design. I thereby progressed from planting window boxes in London, to a small courtyard garden, then scaling up to a large allotment garden rented from the Burghley Estate. Retirement gave time for an MA in Garden History at the Institute of Historical Research and my dissertation on interwar country gardens enabled me to pursue a longstanding interest in the arts, crafts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.

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