How to book Please book online at https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk This allows secure payment and immediate confirmation of your place(s). If you are unable to book online, please complete the booking form in the pdf link at the top of the page and return it with your cheque payment to the address below. Public Education Programme
Harcourt Arboretum, Nuneham Courtenay
Oxfordshire OX44 9PX The Botanic Garden biodiversity lecture 2012Prof. Kathy Willis
Biodiversity conservation: using the past to manage the futureThis talk will examine how historical and palaeoecological records have much to offer to current conservation policy and practice. Palaeoecological records from some of the world’s best known biodiversity hotposts will feature, including the Galapagos, Western Ghats, Madagascar and Mexico’s Sierra de Manatalan. These examples will demonstrate how such records can often provide a more scientifically defensible basis for conservation decisions than those based on only contemporary records. Winter lecture series: Gardens around the worldThis special series of lectures brings together leading gardeners and garden designers to give us their perspectives on gardening around the world. Dan Pearson
A garden for a thousand yearsThe 240 hectare Tokachi Millennium Forest on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, is the brainchild of the media entrepreneur Mitsushige Hayashi, who acquired the land with a view to offsetting the carbon footprint of his national newspaper business, Tokachi Mainichi. In this talk Dan Pearson will describe the genesis of the Millennium Forest project, his involvement in the creation of the masterplan, and the challenges faced in creating large scale massed perennial plantings and a monumental sculptural landform environment. James Wong
The gardens of SingaporeA unique, contemporary blend of East and West, the tiny ‘Garden City’ of Singapore is fast becoming a global centre for innovation in tropical horticulture and landscape design. James Wong will guide us though the city state’s distinctive emerging garden design style, from its origins as a vital outpost for the introduction of new plants across the British empire, to its new multi-billion dollar ‘space age’ botanic gardens by the Bay. Elizabeth Banks
Gardening is happiness–window boxes to the president of the RHSJoin us to hear how a passion for plants led Elizabeth Banks from her own garden to her current role as President of the UK’s leading gardening charity, the Royal Horticultural Society. Isabelle van Groeningen
The Royal Garden Academy in Berlin: The revival of German horticultureIn 2008 Gabriella Pape and Isabelle Van Groeningen re-opened the former Royal Gardeners Training Institute in Berlin. Europe’s oldest surviving horticultural training establishment has a new lease of life, and is the foundation for a new German Horticultural Society. Prof. James Hitchmough
Meadows at the Olympic park: elysium in the east end?The London Olympic Park includes very large-scale native wildflower meadows, rather more cosmopolitan creations of South African Drakensberg grasslands and a North American prairie, in gardens that wrap around the Olympic Stadium. Join James Hitchmough to hear how and why these vegetation types were conceived and designed, the process by which they were established on the ground, and the role of his research over the past 15 years in minimising the risk of failure! Public education continues on page 2 | 
