Friday 21 June

• Arne Maynard - Gardens to be Gardened

  Arne Maynard - Gardens to be Gardened

  An international garden designer with a portfolio of high profile clients, Arne designs gardens across the globe. He is an RHS Gold Medal and Best in Show winning designer and is hailed by his profession as one of most important garden designers working today.

• Tom Williamson - Researching and restoring the Houghton landscape: achievements, challenges and wider issues

  Tom Williamson - Researching and restoring the Houghton landscape: achievements, challenges and wider issues

  Tom Williamson is professor of Landscape history at the University of East Anglia.

• Tim Richardson - Sculpture in the Garden: from Renaissance palace to modern sculpture park

  Tim Richardson - Sculpture in the Garden: from Renaissance palace to modern sculpture park

  Tim Richardson is a garden historian and landscape critic, and an irreverent commentator on all matters pertaining to gardens.

• George Carter - Objects in the Garden

  George Carter - Objects in the Garden

  Objects in the Garden
  Focal points are key to gardens of all sorts large and small this talk looks at the historical use of focal points in gardens - sculptural and architectural - and shows how these ideas can be used in modern gardens
  
  George Carter, who lives in Dereham, is admired for his ability to share ideas from historic landscapes to create magical scenes in modern settings.

• Non Morris and Lady Rose Cecil - Mollie: Portrait of a Gardener - Memories of the 6th Marchioness of Salisbury

  Non Morris and Lady Rose Cecil - Mollie: Portrait of a Gardener - Memories of the 6th Marchioness of Salisbury

  Non is a garden designer and writer. Recent design projects include gardens for the South London Gallery, Peckham and for St Mary The Boltons, 'The Country Church in Kensington and Chelsea'. She writes on gardens for many publications including Country Life . She has a
  Spectator Life column, The Art of The Garden, which links painting and gardening and an acclaimed blog, The Dahlia Papers.

• Julian and Isabel Bannerman - Creating a Scented Garden in Cornwall

  Julian and Isabel Bannerman - Creating a Scented Garden in Cornwall

  Julian and Isabel Bannerman have been designing gardens and garden buildings together since 1983. They have won awards and competitions such as the one to design British Memorial Garden to 9/11 in New York ; RHS Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medal; Civic Trust; Europa Nostra; Georgian Group; Christies Garden of the Year. But the greatest reward is that the gardens are loved and lived in.

• Lisa Chaney - The Biographer Who Gardens

  Lisa Chaney - The Biographer Who Gardens

  Lisa Chaney lectured in the History of Art and Culture for several years before realising, she longed for a wider audience than the university. She has since written acclaimed biographies of three highly influential 20th century figures: Elizabeth David, J. M. Barrie, and Coco Chanel. These figures may appear unconnected to the garden yet, each one is, significantly so; in reality or imagination.
  
  Tracing her path – through childhood Edens across the globe – Lisa became enthralled by the history and practice of gardening. In time she came to write others’ lives. The highly unorthodox Elizabeth David, J.M. Barrie, and Coco Chanel, each 'made' their own singular gardens. One emerged from periods and places, when people were still bound to the land; another was the epitome of early 20th century avante garde. A third was literature’s most unsettling fantasy garden: the childhood Eden, called Neverland.
  
  The biographer’s subjects need tending. Their entanglements, failures, triumphs, inform the life, the progress of her own garden. A life, a biography, a garden: with tenacity, some skill and humour, they advance, overlap and flourish. Their mystery is humbling and inspiring.
  

• Lord Cholmondeley in Conversation with Tim Marlow

  Lord Cholmondeley in Conversation with Tim Marlow

  In 2000, Lord Cholmondeley commissioned James Turrell to create a ‘Skyspace’ at Houghton Hall & Gardens, a viewing chamber to look at an ever-changing square of sky above. Visitors to the Literary Festival can also see site-specific commissions by artists including Anya Gallaccio, Jeppe Hein, Stephen Cox, Phillip King, Rachel Whiteread and Richard Long, each created in dialogue with Houghton and its historic landscape.
  
  Lord Cholmondeley will share his vision for Houghton in conversation with Tim Marlow, broadcaster and Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts. They will also discuss the programme of exhibitions which have included James Turrell in 2015, Richard Long in 2017, Damien Hirst in 2018 and continue with Henry Moore at Houghton Hall: Nature and Inspiration, open 1 May – 29 September 2019.
  
  Tim Marlow is Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts. Prior to his appointment at the Royal Academy, Marlow was Director of Exhibitions at White Cube for over 10 years (2003-2014).
  
  Marlow has been involved in the contemporary art world for the past twenty-five years as curator, writer and award-winning radio and television broadcaster. Having trained as an art historian, he has also worked with many of the most important and influential artists of our time.
  
  Marlow sits on the Board of Trustees for the Imperial War Museum, Sadler’s Wells, Artichoke, Art on the Underground Advisory Board, The British School at Rome and Cultureshock Media.

• Mary Keen - Objects, Incidents, Accidents

  Mary Keen - Objects, Incidents, Accidents

  Mary Keen has designed gardens from America to Corfu, and writes regularly on gardening for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.

• Peter Parker - Latin for Gardeners

  Peter Parker - Latin for Gardeners

  Peter Parker is a journalist and author of A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners.

• Viktor Wynd

  Viktor Wynd

  Viktor Wynd is a 'pataphysician artist and writer, his next book 'The UnNatural History Museum' will be published by Prestel/Random House in Spring 2020. He is the proprietor of 'The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History' - a contemporary Wunderkabinnett in the East End of London, filled with marvels, from Shrunken Heads to Two Headed Lambs, Old Master Etchings, Occult & Surrealist Works. Mermaids, Fairies, McDonalds Happy Meal Toys and everything in between. He is the current Chancellor of The Last Tuesday Society.
  Viktor Wynd will retell a selection of traditional fairy tales from Ireland & The Brothers Grimm.
  

Saturday 21 June

• Sir Roy Strong - Heroes and Heroines

  Sir Roy Strong - Heroes and Heroines

  Sir Roy Colin Strong, CH, FRSL is an English art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer. He has served as director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Strong was knighted in 1982.

• Caroline Donald, Jo Thompson, Sam McKnight - From Divas to Dahlias

  Caroline Donald, Jo Thompson, Sam McKnight - From Divas to Dahlias

  From Divas to dahlias
  When Sam McKnight is not travelling round the world coiffing the hair of the world's top models, he's out deadheading his roses. The legendary hair stylist and Jo Thompson, Chelsea gold-winning designer, talk to Caroline Donald, gardening editor of The Sunday Times, about their collaboration in his north London garden and the joys that gardening brings.
  
  Celebrated session hair stylist, Sam McKnight, is the hairdresser of all hairdressers. He boasts a legendary career spanning over four decades encompassing catwalks, editorial and advertising campaigns for fashion houses such as Chanel, Fendi, Balmain, Burberry and Tom Ford. A regular contributor to both British and international Vogues, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, i-D and Love, he has over 100 covers to his name from British Vogue alone.
  
  Caroline Donald
  Caroline Donald has been gardening editor of the Sunday Times since 2000. A writer and editor with a particular interest in the cross-pollination of gardening, design and the arts – both high and domestic – she has also curated successful series of garden talks at Messum’s gallery in Wiltshire and Durslade, the Somerset outpost of the international art gallery Hauser & Wirth. She has an unruly cottage garden in Somerset.
  
  Jo Thompson
  Listed by House and Garden magazine as one of the country’s top ten garden designers, she has been the recipient of four Gold and five Silver Gilt medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and in 2017 she won the People’s Choice award at the first RHS Chatsworth Flower Show. She is also a member of the RHS Gardens Committee and Garden Advisor for RHS Rosemoor, as well as being a member of the RHS Show Gardens Selection Panel. Jo lectures both nationally and internationally, and also tutors at The London College of Garden Design.

• Luciano Giubbilei - Sculptures and Inspiration from Art

  Luciano Giubbilei - Sculptures and Inspiration from Art

  Luciano Giubbilei‏ is a garden design star known for his Tuscan landscape designs and his winning garden at the 2014 Chelsea Flower Show. His inspirations range from his native Siena to experimental planting at Great Dixter.

• Carol Woolton - Floral Fashions in Jewels from the Nineteenth century to Today

  Carol Woolton - Floral Fashions in Jewels from the Nineteenth century to Today

  Carol Woolton is Contributing Director of Jewellery for British Vogue, Jewellery historian and author of four books including Floral Jewels: From the World's Leading Designers, and is curating an exhibition at the Garden Museum in 2020.

• Victoria Fritz - Making Peace: Restoring Chamberlain’s Garden

  Victoria Fritz - Making Peace: Restoring Chamberlain’s Garden

  Making Peace: Restoring Chamberlain’s Garden
  In 1919 foreign secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain bought “a pretty place, with a lovely view and just what Ivy has always dreamed of”. Over the following decade, Chamberlain and his wife developed a garden of rockeries and roses, at the same time as he cultivated an inter-war peace deal between Britain, France and Germany. Speaking at the Literary Festival this summer, Victoria uncovers the story of the Chamberlains as she restores their garden a century on.
  
  About Victoria Fritz
  Victoria is a BBC News broadcaster and instagardener. Victoria’s passion for the natural world has taken her from British Colombia to Patagonia, along the Amazon and across the Pacific. The practices she learns she shares on social media as @thesocialgardener. Victoria gardens with gusto on five acres of terraced hillside, woodland and meadow on the High Weald in Sussex.
  

• Christopher Woodward - Virginia Woolf and Gardens

  Christopher Woodward - Virginia Woolf and Gardens

  Christopher Woodward is Director of the Garden Museum.

• Catherine Horwood - Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants

  Catherine Horwood - Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants

  Beth Chatto: A Life in Plants
  A look at Beth Chatto's early life and the influences that helped make her one of the 20th century's greatest gardeners.
  
  Catherine started her career as a journalist, drifted into academia and out again to be a full-time writer about her favourite things - dress and gardening history. In addition to writing for publications such as Gardens Illustrated and The English Garden, ​Catherine has worked on exhibitions and broadcasts especially on the history of women in horticulture.

• Hugh St Clair - Artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett Haines in the Garden and the Kitchen at Benton End

  Hugh St Clair - Artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett Haines in the Garden and the Kitchen at Benton End

  Hugh St Clair is a writer, interior design guru and curator. This year he releases a new book, A Lesson in Art & Life, The Colourful World of Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines.

• Robin Lane Fox

  Robin Lane Fox

• Raffaella Barker - On How Growing a Garden Grows a Novel

  Raffaella Barker - On How Growing a Garden Grows a Novel

  Raffaella Barker is the author of novels such as The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, and daughter of the poet George Barker.

• Richard Mabey in Conversation with Christopher Woodward: A Look Back Over A Lifetime’s Writing About Nature

  Richard Mabey in Conversation with Christopher Woodward: A Look Back Over A Lifetime’s Writing About Nature

  Richard Mabey is the author of some thirty books, including the ground-breaking and best-selling “cultural flora” Flora Britannica (1996), winner of a National Book Award, and Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986,. His recent memoir Nature Cure (2005), which describes how reconnecting with the wild helped him break free from debilitating depression, was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes.

• Shane Connolly - Rediscovering the Meaning of Flowers

  Shane Connolly - Rediscovering the Meaning of Flowers

  Rediscovering the Meaning of Flowers
  Cut-flowers, why do we have them? And how can we make the flower insudtry more sustainable?
  
  Shane Connolly's timeless, artisan floral arrangements have attracted clients including HRH Prince of Wales.