Garden Museum Literary Festival 2019

This year the Garden Museum Literary Festival will be at Houghton Hall and Gardens in Norfolk and will be hosted by The Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. The Festival will run on Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd June, 2019 with a full programme of 30 speakers.

Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum, gives a sense of what to expect in a magical midsummer of talks and conversations in one of Britain’s most enchanting homes: “We set up the Festival to celebrate good writing about gardens – and to share what inspires us in gardens,” he says. “There will be talks by designers such as Arne Maynard, Tom Stuart-Smith and by Julian and Isabel Bannerman; Richard Mabey, Britian’s greatest living nature writer; Sir Roy Strong will remember Cecil Beaton’s love of flowers, and Catherine Horwood will give the first glimpse of her biography of Beth Chatto – and Lisa Chaney on what gardens tell a biographer,” Christopher adds.

Festival goers will be able to choose between two or three talks or tours at any one time and with tickets limited to 150 there’s a very special sense of intimacy.

The Festival is also an opportunity to immerse yourself in the spirit of a new place each year. Previous Festivals have been held at Serge Hill, Petworth, Hatfield and Boughton with this year’s event at one of the most astonishing houses to be built in the 18th century, Houghton Hall.

Houghton’s interiors are breathtakingly intact and it’s landscaping – beginning with Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s – continues to this day, right up to the beautiful walled garden created by the current Lord Cholmondeley with the Bannermans, in memory of his grandmother, Lady Sybil Cholmondeley.

This year, a major theme of the Festival will be the artworks commissioned for the landscape by Lord Cholmondeley, which began with ‘Skyspace‘ by James Turrell in 2000 and has continued with pieces by Sir Richard Long, Rachel Whiteread and Anya Gallaccio.

Ticket prices exclude refreshments, which are available to purchase on the site. Accommodation is also not included. The full programme of speakers will be announced on 16th February 2019.

Early bird tickets are available until 16th February.

Photographs ©and courtesy of Houghton Hall and Gardens.