John Evelyn's Sayes Court garden

This lecture will discuss John Evelyn's (1620-1706) designs for the now lost garden that he planted at his family home in Sayes Court, Deptford during the middle years of the seventeenth century.

Juliet will be reconstructing the garden from Evelyn's drawings and, in dialogue with his draft for an all-encompassing book on gardening, Elysium Britannicum: or, The Royal Gardens and other texts, she will interpret its meanings. The garden will emerge as a harmonious microcosm - an image of what Evelyn saw as the perfect harmony of the divinely created universe - a theatre of the sun and moon, an idea elaborated through Evelyn's practice of gardening in accord with the 'celestial influences' - that is to say, his astrological gardening routine.

Juliet has recently been appointed as a senior lecturer in architecture by Newcastle University's School of Architecture Planning and Landscape.

Tom Brigden's lecture on The Protected Vista will now be part of the autumn programme.