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Gardening and Historic Garden Preservation: Turn End and Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust – Buckinghamshire History Festival
Jackie originally studied archaeology and worked as a museum curator in London, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire for 11 years.
Whilst working at Wycombe Museum in High Wycombe she developed a strong interest in furniture and studied furniture design at Buckinghamshire New University whilst re-training as a gardener. After running her own gardening business and working locally for the National Trust she became Gardener at Turn End in 2010.
Jackie enjoys the very varied work, mostly hands-on gardening but also helping manage the estate, hosting group visits and events and working with Turn End Trust on strategic planning and fundraising.
Claire de Carle MA is a garden historian, with a keen interest in horticulture, art and social history. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust Research & Recording project in 2013 which has produced reports on around 100 locally important historic gardens, her work for the project includes mentoring and training the volunteers. She now advises other county garden trusts on setting up similar projects.
For the last two years she has been the vice chair of the trust and she will shortly take over as chair.
She enjoys writing articles about her research into little known historic landscape gardens and more recently she has set up two other projects: Artists and their Gardens and Public Parks in Buckinghamshire. She also lectures to local groups about Buckinghamshire gardens and Maud Grieve, the herbalist who was the subject of her dissertation.