If its New Year, it must be time for some fascinating talks with Warwickshire Gardens Trust! We range from the evidence of resistance in an historic garden via Joseph Chamberlain's Highbury to the wonderful world of the Rothschilds at Exbury in Hampshire.

The third of our talk series on March 18^th, begins at Gunnersbury (the first Rothschild garden in England) where Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild published a catalogue of her own rare orchids from around the world. Cultivating these strange exotics in the Gunnersbury glasshouses was highly experimental and devoted head gardeners shared their findings between the family estates. Nathaniel de Rothschild and his son – the famous zoologist Walter Rothschild – took up orchidology at Tring Park too. Leopold's son, Lionel (1882-1942), developed his first garden at the age of 5, and took Gunnersbury orchids and rhododendrons with him to his new garden at Exbury, Hampshire, in 1919. There his experiments in the scientific field of orchid hybridisation resulted in a fine orchid collection of 28,000 plants by World War II. 

This astonishing story provides a glimpse of how the Rothschilds' investment in their gardens paid off for the benefit of the wider gardening community and is not to be missed!