Cultivating Creations: Gardens and fashion of the Victorian period

Packed with colour and pattern, interior designs vie with brightly coloured bedding schemes, and artificial flowers inside reflect artifice outside. Rich fashion fabrics are resolutely plain, but do the corsets and constrictions, bustles and flounces mirror the contrivances and deceptions in the garden where topiary and carpet bedding entertain? Inside and out are brought together in the middle-class home where ‘taste’ rules all.

Second part in a monthly series examining the interplay of textiles, fashion, culture, and garden design. Each session is sold separately.

Dr Twigs Way is a garden historian, writer and researcher. She is fascinated by the past and intrigued by the role of flowers, gardens and landscape in art and culture of all kinds. Her talks and books reflect that endless curiosity, with themes of symbolism and meaning, class and gender, art and literature, and her desire to follow unknown paths towards the unexpected. From gnomes in Neasden to hollyhocks from the Holy Land, every plant has a tale to tell, every garden a past. Twigs is the Director of MA/PhD in Garden History at the University of Buckingham, as well as a consultant and lecturer in Historic Designed Gardens and Landscapes.