Event 7

Fiona Davison – An Almost Impossible Thing – The Radical Lives of Britain’s Pioneering Women Gardeners

While working at the Royal Horticultural Society, Fiona Davison discovered a cache of letters from a young gardener who was denied a scholarship by the RHS on the grounds that she was female. Appalled and intrigued, she began to research the wider story of early female professional gardeners during a period when British gardens were an arena for radical and far-reaching experiments. An Almost Impossible Thing is a fascinating insight into the lives of six hitherto little-known women gardeners in the years before WWI.

An illustrated talk

Introduced by Deirdre Coates, Chair of Trustees