Launch of Centre for Garden and Landscape Studies at Hestercombe Study day – ‘Healthy Minds: Therapy, Well Being and Wisdom in the Garden’ at Hestercombe Gardens, Taunton, Somerset, Saturday 15th November.
The new Centre for Garden and Landscape Studies based at Hestercombe in Somerset, will be launched with this provoking study day. The Centre will offer interdisciplinary studies covering all aspects of gardens and landscapes.
The study day will be a forum for a variety of discussions, presentations and exchanges about “health in and out of the garden”. A starting point will be provided by a recently discovered recipe book written in the 1720s by Margaret Bampfylde, mother of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde, designer of the eighteenth century Landscape Garden at Hestercombe. This is a book not only of culinary recipes but also antidotes for a wide range of ailments suffered by the inhabitants of Hestercombe at the time (ingredients include all manner of herbs and plants together with snails, earthworms, boiled swallows and calves lungs!).
The book gives an interesting insight into 18th century life and attitudes to well-being. The event will take its cue from the recipe book and explore larger areas around it. A newly published transcript of the recipe book together with an extensive glossary and introductory essay will be launched at the study day.
Amongst the inspiring line up of speakers, are Dr Clare Hickman, Medical History & Humanities postdoctoral Fellow at Kings College London, and Sally Osborn, Roehampton University, who will cast light on therapeutic aspects but also more generally on the interrelation between gardens and the medical world, interconnections between gardeners, cooks, and doctors, the philosophical dimension and the part that the healthy garden might play in the environmental agenda
Arranged on the theme of therapy and wisdom, we are delighted that the study day has been selected to be included in the national ‘Being Human Festival’ organised by London University’s School of Advanced Study, in partnership with the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the British Academy.
The event is also partnered with Paris Sorbonne University, which will be hosting a « Being Georgian Today » study day on November 22nd and with The Maison Française d’Oxford as an extension of the « Oxford Garden and Landscape Studies Seminar » series.
Registration will be available from mid-September at www.hestercombe.com. The cost for the day including a two course lunch, tea, coffee and free entry to Hestercombe’s famous gardens will be £48.00/head and £24.00 for students.
For further information please contact: 01823 413923, [email protected]