Talks take place on Thursday afternoons, starting at 2pm, and usually take place in the Lecture Hall, Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA. These are free for Oxford u3a members but you are welcome to attend as a guest for a donation of £5 (£2 for members of all other U3As).
Most talks are recorded on Zoom for the benefit of those Oxford u3a members who are unable to attend Rewley House.
In the event of adverse weather conditions, please telephone Rewley House (01865 270360), to enquire whether the talk has been cancelled.
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Timothy Walker – Gardening as Fine Art
25th September 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
From 1988-2014 Timothy Walker was the director of the Oxford Botanic Garden. Since 2014 he has been senior college lecturer in plant biology at Somerville College Oxford.
In 1882 Gertrude Jekyll wrote a short but seminal article in The Garden in which she urged the readers to ‘remember that in a garden we are painting a picture’. As an accomplished watercolour artist, Miss Jekyll was familiar with the principles of using colours, but she felt that in gardens these principles ‘had been greatly neglected’. This talk looks at how to apply these principles in designing a border, but it also looks at the ways in which a border is different from a painting. However, it goes further than this and looks at how contemporary work of the likes of Turner, Monet, Rothko, Jackson Pollock evolved in parallel with ideas about what a garden or border should look like.