Keynote lecture, Reimagining Rurality conference, Westminster

Description

Keynote lecture at close of conference. Title: 'Back to the garden'. From introduction:

When I began writing Radical Gardening I was really struck by the words of the gardener-artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, from his contumacious green space called Little Sparta in the Scottish lowlands: ‘Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks’. But how can a garden be an attack, a flower a critique, a dug-up lawn an agent of social change? The purpose of this lecture is to open up a very small area of land questioning, moving from the politics of the garden to the ‘horti-counterculture’, the lost garden of psychedelia, to the pop festival or music gathering as problematic site of green imaginary. The latter questions draw on scholarship from a new collection I’ve edited that’s published this summer, The Pop Festival. But they also go back to moments and movements I was discussing two decades ago, in Senseless Acts of Beauty.

Period	2015
Event type	Other
Degree of Recognition	National