Wonderland: Curious Nature Symposium

Curiouser and Curiouser: The Ever-Changing English Garden
Ambra Edwards | 10–11 a.m.
For as long as gardens have fed our bellies, they have also fed our imaginations. From the austere cloister gardens of medieval monasteries intended to encourage meditation and prayer to the most exciting and innovative gardens in England today, award-winning writer and garden historian Ambra Edwards will take us on a historical tour of the English garden. Along the way, we’ll encounter gardens of love and of protest, fantasy worlds created variously to express longings or to provoke violent emotions.

Edwards will trace the links between garden-making and art, literature and memory, and celebrate the garden as an imaginative space for hopes and dreams, for exploration and transformation.

Wildside: Landscape of Memory and Dreams
Keith Wiley | 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Hailed by many as the most imaginative and adventurous garden in England today, Wildside was created by plantsman and designer Keith Wiley. By manipulating scale, Wiley makes a three-acre site feel much larger than it is, evoking deep mysterious valleys, distant mountain tops, and creating a journey of water from a sacred spring to the oxbow lakes of the plain. His aim is to capture the essence of remembered landscapes, ranging across the globe from the Temblor hills of California to the rockscapes of Utah and from the flower meadows of South Africa to the mossy walls and tumbledown barns of his English childhood.

Wiley will share the garden’s evolution over the last 24 years from a flat, featureless field to a rich and complex landscape that not only offers ecological niches and a vast array of plants, but also creates a satisfying dreamscape of rare emotional power.

About the Speakers