News From The Borders

What’s going on elsewhere in Cambridgeshire, the Gardens Trust or neighbouring county Trusts

If you know of an event or activity that you think may be of interest, please contact admin@cambridgeshiregardenstrust.org.uk

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CIH Skills Summit – 4 November 2026

The Chartered Institute of Horticulture (CIH) is excited to bring the profession together at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on Wednesday 4 November 2026 to explore the state of education and skills across horticulture.

The CIH Skills Summit 2026 will discuss how the profession is developing the people and capabilities it needs, both now and for the future, and will demonstrate some inspiring examples of how students are exploring contemporary issues across the sector. Open to everyone working in, supporting or connected with horticulture, the event will bring together employers, educators, training providers, and horticulturists from across the sector.

Horticulture relies upon an informed, knowledgeable and highly skilled workforce. However, the profession continues to be misunderstood and faces important questions about how people are attracted into horticulture, where practical and technical skills are developed, and whether current education and training provision is keeping pace with the changing needs of the industry.

Through a diverse range of expert speakers and contributors, the summit will take an honest look at the current skills landscape, identify areas of good practice and examine where further work is required. It will consider the entire journey, from horticultural education and early career development through to industry training and continuing professional development.

Tickets are now available. To find out more and book your place, visit the CIH website.

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
Government has published its decision on limiting the role of the Gardens Trust as a statutory consultee in planning applications. See the GT statement here.

The Gardens Trust is particularly concerned that proposals affecting the settings of parks and gardens will be excluded from the intention to notify them of planning applications. This puts the nation’s designed green spaces, created and enjoyed over hundreds of years, at immediate risk of harm through poorly informed development.

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Resources and forthcoming events

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The Gardens Trust AGM – 8 September 2026

Gardens Trust members and County Gardens Trust voting representatives are invited to join the Gardens Trust’s Annual General Meeting, which will be on the 8th September from 6:00-8:00pm online on Zoom. Please note that only GT members and County Gardens Trust voting representatives will be entitled to vote. (Joint Gardens Trust members will each need to book a place to attend and log in from separate devices to be able to vote.)

Those unable to attend are encouraged to appoint a proxy using forms sent to members with this summer’s edition of GT News or they can be requested from the GT Honorary Secretary, Catriona Hoyes, via email.

Join in to review a busy year for the Gardens Trust and to celebrate how the Trust has risen to the challenges presented.

Booking for this event via EventBrite is essential, closing at 6:00pm on 4th September.

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The Historic Landscapes Assembly 2026
Milton Keynes, 23-24 September 2026

Overview

This two-day conference brings together academics, practitioners, policymakers, and those with direct experience of New Town development to explore how the histories of New Towns can inform their futures.
Day one will include presentations and discussions with practitioners, heritage organisations and academics, including case study sites looking at the role of landscapes, gardens, ecology, nature and public art in new towns. 
Day two will focus on the green space in host city Milton Keynes, arguably one of the most successful of the new towns, and include guided tours on foot or by bike of some of the city’s important parks.  

You can sign up for the whole event, or for either day, or join the event online for the first day. Tickets have just gone on sale and Early Bird discounts are currently available.

Details and bookings are via https://thegardenstrust.org/bookings-open-for-new-town-landscapes-conference/

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Free training from The Gardens Trust in research and recording

The Gardens Trust offers free training events, open to all, on gathering and using research into historic parks, gardens and landscapes. This programme, partially funded by Historic England, supports gardens trust volunteers and other interested individuals in playing a proactive role in the conservation of our historic designed landscapes. It can assist with research and recording projects run within the county-based gardens trusts, and holds workshops to help share our experiences and expertise. Whether raising awareness, training volunteers or building networks the small but dynamic Volunteer Support team is on hand to help champion our treasured heritage of parks and gardens.

Other resources from the project, such as slides and handouts, will be available at The Gardens Trust online Resource Hub.

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The Bicycle Boys

Loyal Johnson (1905-1999), an American horticultural student, visited Britain in 1928 with his friend Sam Brewster. Together they undertook a three-month tour of English, Welsh and Scottish gardens, covering 1500 miles on bicycles (see above). In total the young men visited around 70 gardens, including Munstead Wood where Gertrude Jekyll was in residence, Gravetye Manor with garden paths adapted for William Robinson’s wheelchair, Great Dixter where they were reprimanded by Nathaniel Lloyd before getting a guided tour, Aldenham House, Chatsworth, Levens Hall, Blickling, Hestercombe House, Hoar Cross House, Compton Wynyates, Blenheim Palace, the Sutton Nursery Company at Reading and many others, including a visit to Emmanuel College in late August 1928. Loyal kept a detailed diary of the trip in three volumes, describing the gardens they visited, the places they stayed and the people they met, creating a historical and social record of inter-war Britain and its gardens.

Johnson’s diaries and photograph albums were donated by his son Marshall to the RHS Lindley Library in 2015 and feature in an exciting new online exhibition The Bicycle Boys: An Unforgettable Garden Tour, launched on 8 June 2022 on the RHS Libraries Digital Collections. The exhibition forms part of the Gardens Trust’s Unforgettable Gardens campaign to raise awareness of the value of local parks and gardens and the importance of protecting them for our future.

Gin Warren of CGT has worked with Amanda Goode, the Emmanuel College Archivist, to research Johnson’s visit to Cambridge and to the college. Arriving in Liverpool from the RMS Laconia on 18 June 1928, Loyal and Sam bought bicycles and suitcases for their equipment and set off on their tour. By the time they arrived in Cambridge on 29 August, they had cycled through the north, the midlands, the west country, much of southern England, including London, and were heading north again. They had seen many towns and cities and yet Sam noted I think I like Cambridge the best of any place I have seen yet. It can be compared to Oxford yet it is so different. Being the long vacation, Cambridge would have been quiet and Sam could engage with a number of college gardeners. At Emmanuel College he observed that it has large gardens and a swan pool and a nice outdoor swimming pool too. However, his brief comment on Emmanuel’s water features covers a multitude of connections, some less savoury than others…

Emmanuel College ponds

In 1610 water rising in the Ninewells Springs near Great Shelford was diverted from the Vicar’s Brook into a new course, called Hobson’s River or Brook, running alongside Trumpington Road and the Botanic Gardens and ending up at the present-day Conduit Head at Lensfield Road (see figure above). Originally intended to flush the pestilential King’s Ditch and improve sanitation, the supply quickly became an important source of drinking water. Several water runs were built from Conduit Head and, in 1631, a branch was constructed along present-day Lensfield Road and St Andrew’s Street towards Drummer Street where it splits into feeds that ran into Emmanuel and Christ’s Colleges, as well as a public dipping point. The colleges wanted the water for their ornamental pools which still survive in altered form. Emmanuel College took the water via Chapman’s Garden to feed a large pond – originally a mediaeval fishpond for the college’s founding Dominican monks – that is shown in Loggan’s 1690 Cantabrigia Illustrata and, in the 19C, a rectangular pond in the Fellows’ Garden, the swimming pool noted by Loyal Johnson in 1928. Today, the conduit water supplies the curved pond in Chapman’s Garden, the more informally landscaped main Paddock pond and, after appropriate filtration, the Fellows’ Garden swimming pool (see below).

‘Swan Pool’ and the Anatomists

In the Long Vacation of 1928, there weren’t many people around to tell the Bicycle Boys the history and stories connected with Emmanuel’s gardens. Loyal had noted the ‘Swan Pool’ (now the main pond in The Paddock), but apparently nobody told him that it had been the hiding place for a stolen corpse.

Stolen corpse? Not in Rembrandt’s 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp that followed the dissection of Aris Kindt, aka Adriaan Adriaanszoon, who was hanged for armed robbery. Rembrandt painted the scene on the day he was executed. In Amsterdam, one dissection of an executed criminal a year was allowed, so this was not a stolen corpse.

A little earlier, William Harvey, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and physician to King James I, was teaching anatomy in London, having studied in Padua under Italian anatomist and surgeon, Hieronymous Fabricius. Using both mathematics and empirical science, including dissections of executed criminals, Harvey demonstrated that Galen’s assertion, that the liver made blood which then flowed to the extremities, could not possibly be correct. Harvey published De Motu Cordis in 1628 and medical science was never the same again: unquestioning reliance on classical sources and belief systems was demolished, and purposeful experimentation became part of the scientific method.

Stolen corpse in Cambridge in the 1730s? Yes: two Fellows of Emmanuel College dug up the body of someone newly buried in Fen Ditton – or made arrangements for it to be exhumed for them. The deceased’s friends and relatives realised what had happened and stormed the college. They searched diligently but failed to find the body, as it had been wrapped and weighted down in the Swan Pool for later recovery.

Body snatching was apparently rare in 18C Britain: the high execution rate, even for trivial crimes, assured supply. Furthermore, the 1751 Murder Act prevented the bodies of convicted murderers from being buried – they were either displayed publicly or handed over for dissection. By the early 19C the number of executions had fallen to around 55 a year, while the growth of surgical science meant that about 500 bodies were needed. Stealing bodies from churchyards probably wasn’t difficult because many in towns were so full that new burials were very shallow, in graves which had been pre-used many times. Christopher Wren and John Evelyn had noted how disgusting urban graveyards were in the 17C and, by the early 19C, churchyard overcrowding and the consequent opportunity for body-snatching were significant issues.

In London, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham had drawn attention to the problem and, in 1828, a parliamentary select committee had drafted a Bill for preventing the unlawful disinterment of human bodies, and for regulating Schools of Anatomy. The House of Lords threw it out in 1829. Bentham subsequently left his own body to be publicly dissected (1832), to try to change public opinion on the topic.

Families who could afford it tried to protect fresh graves. J.C. Loudon reported several methods of thwarting body-snatchers in his 1843 book On the laying out, planting, and managing of cemeteries and on the improvement of churchyards. These included building walls and fences, hiring watchmen, creating very deep graves, and even using a mortsafe – a weighty cast-iron box, toremain over the coffin for six of eight weeks, till decomposition rendered the body unfit for the purposes of the anatomist. The mortsafe was then disinterred for reuse and the grave completed in the usual manner.

The problem of locating the recently deceased could be circumvented by procuring their death. Burke and Hare infamously provided for the surgeons and anatomists of Edinburgh in 1827-8, probably murdering 16 people on their lucrative spree. Burke and Hare were paid £8 to £10 per body, whereas Burke’s day-job as a cobbler earned him around £1 a week.

The Anatomy Act of 1832, the year of Bentham’s dissection, finally enabled Anatomy Schools to collect from workhouses, prisons and hospitals bodies which had not been claimed for burial in the 48 hours after death. It was deeply resented by the poor, because prior to the Act they had run the same risk as everyone else of being body-snatched and dissected. Now it was systematically they who were dissected, like common criminals, and Loudon tells us that they felt this keenly. In fact, it was one of the reasons for the rejection of the 1828 bill, as the reformer William Cobbett opined, ‘They tell us it was necessary for science. Science? Why, who is science for? Not for poor people. Then if it is necessary for science, let them have the bodies of the rich, for whose benefit science is cultivated.’

Swim Swan Swim

It is somewhat ironic that two swans in Emmanuel’s Pond helped to overthrow a theory expounded by Cambridge’s greatest physicist, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton had studied optics throughout his life and had made huge achievements in understanding the nature of light based on careful experimentation. His great work, Opticks (1704), is one of the earliest approaches to scientific understanding based on applying mathematics to experiments, in contrast to applying deductive reasoning based on assumptions or axioms. In it, Newton maintained that light from a candle consisted of a stream of tiny particles, called corpuscles, that were emitted by the candle, travelled in straight lines and entered the eye to create the perception of light and colour. Newton’s corpuscular theory contrasted with the wave theory of light, proposed by Christiaan Huygens in 1678, and such was the overwhelming weight of Newton’s reputation that Huygens’ wave theory was consigned to the deep-freeze of history for 125 years.

Enter Thomas Young (1773-1829); a polymath whom some considered to be the last man who knew everything. Young was the eldest of 10 children and was fluent in both Greek and Latin by the age of 14. He studied medicine at Bart’s Hospital, Edinburgh University and the University of Göttingen, and was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society at the age of 21 after writing a paper on visual accommodation in the eye. In 1797, Young entered Emmanuel College and, in 1799, set himself up as a physician in London. Despite launching a successful medical career, Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (i.e. physics) in 1801 at the recently founded Royal Institution, where he delivered 91 lectures in the course of two years.

While at Cambridge, Young became interested in the nature of light and, in 1803, he conducted an experiment which eventually fired a cannonball through the corpuscular theory and holed it below the waterline. It is said that while observing the pattern of ripples created by two swans swimming in Emmanuel’s Pond, Young noticed that, in places, ripple-peaks from one swan coincided with troughs from the other swan and cancelled each other out. He created a ripple tank to demonstrate the effect on water waves under controlled conditions. (See schematic figure to the right. Red lines link points where the two sets of waves from ‘swans’ S1 and S2 reinforce each other; nulls occur mid-way between each red line where the waves cancel each other out.) He then extended his experiment to see whether similar patterns could be observed using light instead of water waves.

Young devised his eponymous two-slit interference experiment, whereby light from a single narrow primary slit (a in figure) illuminated two further slits (b and c), arranged at equal distance from the centre line. Each secondary slit acts as a source of light which falls on a screen (d) where Young observed a pattern of light and dark stripes, spreading symmetrically from a bright, central stripe. He inferred, correctly, that light from each secondary slit was interfering with light from the other slit and, because both slits were illuminated by light from the same primary slit, the stripes were due to constructive and destructive interference, just like the water ripples from the two swans.

Young’s famous experiment was the first physical proof of the wave nature of light and his experiments were supported by theory from others, such as Augustin-Jean Fresnel, to explain and quantify his observations. In the 20C, Albert Einstein gave some solace to corpusculists by demonstrating that light could interact with matter both as a wave and as a particle, a concept from quantum mechanics known as wave-particle duality, but modern physics recognises light as a part of the electromagnetic wave spectrum, beautifully described by James Clerk Maxwell in his eponymous equations. Young had an illustrious career, with major contributions to sound, optics, elasticity, a theory of tides and the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone. He advised on the introduction of gas lighting in London and was foreign secretary at the Royal Society. His monument in Westminster Abbey recognises his achievements as being from a ‘man alike eminent in almost every department of human learning’: an appropriate epitaph for a polymath.

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The Gardens Trust offers a wide variety of talks and events. Please see their events webpage for full details. Information on Gardens Trust training courses that cover Conservation and Plannning can be found on our Planning Resources page.

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