ags logo

AGS Zoom Lectures

November 10, 2023
Content Sidebar

Online lectures enable us to share our love of alpines with a wide international audience. For this purpose, once again we have put together an exciting programme of online plant lectures and gardening talks to keep you informed and entertained.

AGS members can attend our regular Zoom lectures free of charge. However, to register interest, they must log-in and “purchase” a free ticket.

Tickets for non-members will cost £9 for each talk.

Links for the Zoom meetings will be sent with the purchase confirmation email.

Growing Alpines in the Schachen Alpine Garden: a satellite garden of the Munich Botanic Garden in the Bavarian Alps, Jenny Wainwright-Klein
Tuesday 19 March 2024, 7.30 pm GMT

The Schachen Alpine Garden was opened in 1901 and is one of the oldest alpine gardens in the European Alps. Situated on the northern flanks of the Wetterstein Range above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the garden has the ideal combination of a cool, moist summer and snow-covered winter for the cultivation of Meconopsis, Himalayan Primulas, many European alpines, plants from the Lesotho Drakensberg and many more alpine plants. Since the summer of 1994 Jenny has spent her summers working in the Schachen Alpine Garden; during the rest of the year she works in the Alpine propagation unit in the Munich Botanic Garden.

After purchasing this ticket you will be sent a confirmation email which will include the link for the Zoom meeting.

PREVIOUS ONLINE PLANT AND GARDENING LECTURES

Some of our past lectures as well as many other videos on various aspects of alpine gardening are now available to watch on demand or for free on our YouTube Channel. If you want to be notified the moment new videos are available to watch for free, please make sure to subscribe to our Channel.

Plant Exploration Zoom Conference

This event has been recorded, book a ticket below and you will receive the link for the recording.

Emily Hazell (Director of Horticulture and Curation at Birmingham Botanical Garden), Lucie Willan (Head Gardener at the MGS garden Sparoza, Athens) and Selina Tan & Zoe Roberts (Kew students) will share their plant exploration experiences during an online event.

Emily will talk about her trips to South Africa, Lucie will focus on her time in Greece, and Selina and Zoe will tell us more about their trip to Bhutan, which was partly funded by the AGS.

Lectures:

Exploring the Western Cape in a 1 L Hybrid ~ Emily Hazell

Emily won the Ernst Thorton-Smith Travel Scholarship prize for the best Diploma proposal during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The prize felt bittersweet at the time, as a new wave of COVID took over South Africa, her desired destination and travel bans instigated once more. Fortunately, she could postpone by one year, travelling to the Cape in South Africa in the winter of 2022. This talk will cover the escapades of two botanists equipped with a 1 L Hybrid with high clearance and an extreme enthusiasm for plants. Join Emily for an account of roadside botanising, hikes in the clouds, and trail runs around the super biodiverse reserves of the Western Cape. This adventure would have been an all-out flop without the expertise & companionship of Kay Murray, a master’s student at Stellenbosch university and other South African experts.

Emily got into horticulture as she felt that growing vegetables was the most radical thing she could do. Growing vegetables on a heavy clay allotment in Bristol gave her the skills and confidence to qualify as a horticulturist. Emily started working as a freelance private gardener for women who seemed to know each other from Greenham Common Nuclear Power protests and went onto run a horticultural training unit for vulnerable adults. She then undertook the Kew Diploma at RBG Kew and graduated top of her year. Currently, she holds the role of Head of Horticulture and Curation at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, working on rebuilding the collections there and leading on the horticultural aspects of a £14.9 million Capital project, which includes restoring the Victorian Glasshouses. In the future, Emily hopes to go on as many botanising trips as possible, both locally and internationally.

Travels through greece, the garden of the gods – lucie willan

Lucie Willan is currently the head gardener at Sparoza the headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society just outside Athens. The garden at Sparoza is in essence a wild garden that celebrates the flora of Greece and plants from the different Mediterranean climate zones around the world. It is a bulb lovers paradise. From the first autumn rains the garden is carpeted with a succession of native geophytes. Cyclamen graecum and Sternbergia lutea give way to a sea of Muscari comosum, Anemone coronaria and Iris tuberosa studded with several different Ophrys species. It is like Botticelli’s Primavera has come to life. While the low elevation and heat at Sparoza make it difficult to grow alpine plants, 80% of Greece is mountainous and in her spare time Lucie likes nothing more than exploring mountains to hunt for plants in their natural habitats. There are over 4,000 named mountains in Greece so in order to narrow the remit of the talk Lucie will discuss plant hunting in places made famous by their connections to Greek myths.

Lucie was passionate about plants and historic gardens from an early age. Having studied Art History at Cambridge, she spent the first ten years of her career working in the art world, latterly as an oriental carpet specialist at Christie’s. It was a seamless transition from woven fields of flowers to real ones. She has worked at a number of historic gardens such as Bramdean House, Sissinghurst, Hidcote and Monk’s House. It was at Sissinghurst that she became interested in Greek flora and dry gardening after creating designs for an area known as the Living Desert. However, it was due to a bursary from the Alpine Garden Society that Lucie first travelled to Greece and fell in love with the country and its flora. The 2018 AGS trip to hunt for autumn-flowering bulbs in the Peloponnese was a turning point. It was a life changing experience. It was an exceptionally good year and to observe the incredible displays of native geophytes in the wild, where they choose to grow and the conditions they like, with fellow plant lovers was a complete revelation. The adventure has continued ever since.

Breathless in Bhutan: Climbing mountains in search of communities ~ Selina Tan & Zoe Roberts.

A landlocked country, in the Himalayas, Bhutan sits between China and India and is almost entirely mountainous. With mountain peaks reaching more than 7000 meters, Bhutan holds a massive range of habitats for flora and fauna from temperate cloud forest to alpine scree. As such, Bhutan maintains a large commitment to conservation with the constitution enacting that Bhutan maintains 60% forest coverage. This talk will be a journey through Bhutan to look at how plant communities survive in the face of uncertain prospects and how conservation programmes have formed in supports of not only the environment but the local villagers who live amongst them. How the balance of religion, humans and nature come together to form the first carbon negative country.

Selina is currently a third year Kew diploma student. Prior to horticulture she used to be a photo editor working in print media before applying for an apprenticeship with the Royal Parks in Richmond Park. She has an interest in green public spaces and how plants connect with people. Selina also has a penchant for hiking and enjoys discovering the layers of flora the higher you get and learning how they adapt and change throughout. With a commitment to community conservation and a plethora of untouched ecosystems in the mountains, a trip to the Dragon Kingdom was most apt for her.

Sign up for our e-newsletter to make sure you are kept informed about our future online plant and gardening lectures and events.

JOIN US NOW

And enjoy free access to our talks

Join Us Now