With the rise of the English landscape movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, gardens became a reflection of taste, fashion, and social ambition. The sweeping designs of Capability Brown and the picturesque visions of Humphry Repton reshaped the countryside, while at the same time, an expanding global plant trade introduced new flowers and shrubs into Regency gardens. These developments were more than aesthetic—they carried cultural, economic, and even political significance, shaping the very spaces Jane Austen and her contemporaries inhabited. This lecture will trace the history of these gardens and the plants that filled them, revealing how horticulture and literature together illuminate Austen’s Regency world.

The Lecture takes place on Zoom on October 22 and will be available through December online.  Link to further information and for tickets https://www.royal-oak.org/event/zoom-gardens-in-jane-austens-works/

Molly Williams is the author of Jane Austen’s Garden: A Botanical Tour of the Classic Novels along with four other nonfiction works that highlight the history of cultivated plants. Molly is a Gates Cambridge scholar and PhD student studying the intersection of nineteenth century literature and horticulture.