| Where | Great Broughton Village Hall | Type of Event | Illustrated Talk |
| When | Monday 16th May 2022 | Tutor | Louise Wickham |
On Monday May 16th 2022 We were treated to an expert presentation on Garden History in our area.
Our speaker Louise Wickham is a professional historian working for the Yorkshire Garden History Trust and her skill and knowledge shone through constantly.
The two landscapes chosen for this talk were Ingleby Manor and Busby Hall, one inside our local history boundary and the other very close to it.
Entitled ‘The Gardens and Parkland of Greenhow, Ingleby Manor and Busby Hall’ the presentation covered a period from the earliest designed landscapes which were in fact medieval deer parks through Elizabethan ‘prodigy’ Houses and on to formal French-Dutch style formal gardens. The next phase was mid 18th C plantations, pleasure grounds and separate kitchen gardens, followed by 19th century estates and expanding to include shooting areas. The final phase covered 19/20th C return to formal gardens and herbaceous borders.
There were two families to which the story of these gardens principally related the Foulis family at Ingleby and the Marwoods at Busby hall.
Louise has carried out significant research into both sites and in the case of Ingleby was able to piece together significant new findings based on transcribing estate documents and walking the landscape with its owner Christine Bianco.
Louise first traced the history of Greenhow Park moving to the building of Ingleby Manor around 1550, with Renaissance influences in both building and gardens likely. Significant changes took place when the manor was purchased by sir David Foulis in 1608. Well connected to the royal family he was granted the manor of Greenhow and may well have created the landscape shown in the Kip & Knyff engraving.
Busby estate was acquired by William Marwood in 1587, he enclosed the lordship of Busby in 1596 and by 1606 had built a mansion house with a garden, lawns, orchard and pasture covering four and a half acres.
Louise explained how landscape gardening was transformed rejecting formal gardens and developing planned landscapes. The most famous was Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and it was one of his pupils Thomas White who redesigned the grounds of Busby Hall in the period 1765-67. Subsequent developments including a kitchen garden were incorporated using other landscape architects. Several plans and maps were displayed to show the developments.
Further extensions and plantings were accounted for with a recorded 2,189 trees in the wider landscape. The kitchen garden received a stove or hothouse. At the same time in the 18th century the Foulis family bought more land but the parkland had converted to fields whilst a new area of park was developed to the North of the Manor House.
In the 19th Century the agricultural revolution led to larger arable lands whilst poorer land was given over to parkland for grazing animals. Timber provided a good source of income for both estates and shooting game birds increased in popularity.
In the final slides Louise brought her audience into the later part of the 19th Century and encouraged all those interested to follow up and find more using their website
www.yorkshiregardenstrust.org.uk