The Botanic Garden Winter Lecture Series runs each year from late January until late March and features renowned garden designers, garden historians and plantsmen sharing their passion, knowledge and enthusiasm for all things horticultural.

Tickets cost £12 per lecture or £54 for the series and can be purchased online here. The ticket price includes a glass of wine or a soft drink after the lecture.

Lectures take place in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Said Business School at 8pm. The Said Business School is adjacent to Oxford Railway Station.

The speakers for 2013 are:

Thursday 24th January

Andrea Wulf

Founding gardeners: The revolutionary generation, nature, and the shaping of the American nation

This beautifully illustrated talk looks at the lives of the founding fathers and how their attitude to plants, gardens, nature and agriculture shaped the American nation. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison regarded themselves foremost as farmers and plantsmen, and for them gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. In a unique retelling of the creation of America, award-winning historian Andrea Wulf will show how plants, politics and personalities intertwined as never before.

Purchase tickets online here.

Thursday 7th February

Chris Crowder

Shaping history - the garden at Levens Hall

Gardens can be a living link with the past, and few reflect this more than the garden at Levens Hall whose layout and iconic topiary were first established more than three centuries ago. Chris Crowder, head gardener there for over 25 years, will chart its evolution through historic documents, plans and paintings to present day photography. Chris will reveal a reverence for its past, whilst acknowledging that refreshment and renewal are vital in presenting great gardens to each new generation.

Purchase tickets online here.

Thursday 21st February

Sophieka Piebenga

The landscape gardener WIlliam Sawrey Gilpin

William Sawrey Gilpin (c1762-1843) was a landscape painter who, late in life, turned to landscape gardening. A nephew of the Reverend William Gilpin (writer on the picturesque aesthetic), W S Gilpin applied the principles of painting to the improvement of landscapes. During the 1820s and 1830s he established himself as a much sought- after landscape gardener, working for ‘some hundreds’ of landowners across the British Isles. One such owner is Edward Vernon- Harcourt for whom Gilpin is believed to have worked in the 1830s at Nuneham Courtenay and in particular at what is now known as the Harcourt Arboretum.

Purchase tickets online here.

Thursday 7th March

Christopher Woodward

The history of floristry and the cut flower trade

To coincide with the Garden Museum’s new exhibition, its Director Christopher Woodward sketches out the story of the cut flower trade in Britain, from the country house cutting garden and Covent Garden Market to the transformations in fashion led by Getrude Jekyll and Constance Spry - and the inspiration to artists. How did the trade become a $40 billion global industry, suddenly at the centre of ethical and ecological controversy?

Purchase tickets online here.

Thursday 28th March

Anna Pavord

Historic gardens: Restoration or ruin?

What are historic gardens for? What motives determine their management, their future appearance, their style? Are these gardens exercises in nostalgia, first cousins to theme parks, recreating the settings of a vanished way of life for us, as tourists, to wallow in? Or are they museums, chronological chapters in a book of garden history, to be preserved forever in aspic? These questions are asked by Anna Pavord, a member for ten years of English Heritage’s Parks and Gardens Panel and also chairman of the National Trust’s gardens panel.

Purchase tickets online here.