EDEN’S KEEPERS

It would be very easy to draw up a long list of well-known gardeners who were queer, from Horace Walpole and Béatrice de Rothschild to Beverley Nichols and Vita Sackville-West. But is there a link between sexuality and creating a garden?  Have the imaginations and energies of people whose private lives have placed them outside society’s norms been redirected toward designing gardens? Why is it that queer gardeners have been so influential in the formation of gardening taste?

In the first of a series on this theme, the biographer and historian Peter Parker will be discussing these questions with three authors who have studied sexuality and gardening in the 20th Century: Nicola Shulman on the eccentric plant hunter and writer Reginald Farrer; Hugh St Clair on the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris; and Sarah Barclay on the artist and garden designer Humphrey Waterfield.