Founder of the Botanic Garden, Professor John Henslow gave the children in his parish school ‘instruction in botany as a useful and not unimportant method of awakening curiosity’. How do we look at plants today? Perspectives today range from the molecular to the poetic, but all start with curiosity.
Your ticket price includes admission to the Garden (opens at 10am), all the talks, morning refreshments and sandwich lunch from the Garden Café, and optional tours at the end of the day.
A trick of the light? Petal surfaces that influence pollinator behaviour: Professor Beverley Glover, Cambridge University Botanic Garden
Becoming ‘all eye’: Virginia Woolf’s colour sense: Dr Claudia Tobin, Faculty of English, Cambridge University
Morning Session II
Taxonomy from Space: Professor David Coomes, Department of Plant Sciences, Cambridge University
The micro-scale imaging of alpine plants: Dr Ray Wightman, Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University
Afternoon Session I
Re-Organising Paradise: Making sense of the flower and physic garden in medieval and Tudor England: Dr Twigs Way, landscape historian and Chair, Cambridge Gardens Trust
Any Other Name: The Poetics of Perfume: Dr Sophie Read, Faculty of English, Cambridge University
Afternoon Session II: optional tours
Director’s picks
Head of Horticulture’s Picks
The Systematics Beds
Research facilities
Speaker Biographies Day 2
David Coomes leads a research group at the Department of Plant Sciences, Cambridge University focussing on forest conservation and ecology. David uses large databases and modern computational approaches, alongside traditional field techniques, to tackle problems surrounding the conservation of the world’s dwindling biological diversity.
Beverley Glover is Director of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and Professor of Plant Systematics and Evolution at the University of Cambridge. Following a degree at the University of St Andrews and a PhD at the John Innes Centre, she established her research programme in Cambridge in 1999, where her focus is on understanding the evolution and development of flowers and their ability to attract animal pollinators.
Sophie Read is a lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. She works primarily on seventeenth-century poetry; she is interested in the intersection of literature and religion (theology, liturgy, the Bible), and in literature and the senses. Her current project, provisionally entitled Speaking Sweet: Renaissance Rhetorics of Smell, is on perfume and the sense of smell in the early modern world.
Claudia Tobin is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. Her research broadly explores the relationship between literature and visual cultures in the 20th century, and her current project investigates colour and the imagination in modern art and literature. She often collaborates with museums and galleries, and has contributed to the upcoming Virginia Woolf exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Twigs Way has worked in historic landscapes for over thirty years, expanding her studies on medieval parks into gardens and landscapes of all periods. She undertakes lecturing, research, writing and is a consultant for landscape management plans. Twigs enjoys integrating art, literature and landscapes, as well as celebrating gardens of the working and middle classes, and women in landscape history.
Ray Wightman is a plant scientist and microscopist based at the Sainsbury Laboratory. Ray uses modern microscopy methods to look at the inner workings of plants, focusing on how cells grow and divide to form leaves and flowers.
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Or in person at 2 Wheeler Street.