SGT Winter Lectures 2025

The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely-talented theatre director and gay-rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, bleak, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.

Jill is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-16th and early-17th centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the Universities of Birmingham and Worcester and has devised and taught courses in garden history at Winterbourne House (a part of the University of Birmingham). She is an occasional lecturer to a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust’s online programme, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press in 2018. 

Columbine Hall is a moated Manor House that was bought by Hew Stevenson and his late wife, Leslie Geddes-Brown, in 1993. They restored the house, gardens and grounds, which have featured in many books (including Secret Gardens of East Anglia by Barbara Segall) and magazines including Country Living, Country Life, Gardens Illustrated, The English Garden and The Kitchen Garden. George Carter designed the one-acre garden ‘platform’ within and enhanced by the moat.

Kate is Head Gardener at Columbine Hall, having come there at 16, straight from school, and has been in charge of the gardens for 28 years. She was a finalist in 2009’s Professional Gardener of the Year and is a member of the Professional Gardeners’ Guild. In this personal account she will be talking about her love of gardening and the part she has played in the development of Columbine Hall’s gardens.