Designer John Brookes' Denmans Garden: A Room Outside

Join us for a morning in West Sussex, England for a spring stroll through Denmans Garden, the former home and garden of the late John Brookes MBE, one of Britain’s most influential landscape designers, and discuss the release of a new book about Brookes, How to Design a Garden, edited by Gwendolyn van Paasschen.

Register for Designer John Brookes' Denmans Garden

Join Denmans Foundation chairman, Gwendolyn van Paasschen, as she takes us through the gardens and dives into Brookes' vision which includes gardens interspersed with dry riverbeds, gravel gardens, a walled garden, a conservatory, and unusual plants from around the world. Learn about the history of the property and the designer, who is widely credited for being the "man who made the modern garden". It was Brookes who coined the phrase “room outside”, the concept of a garden as a useable living space, not a collection of individual plants.

About the Presenter

Gwendolyn van Paasschen, is a garden designer and writer. After having worked with internationally renowned British landscape designer and author John Brookes MBE on a major multi-year project in upstate New York, she helped him write his memoir, A Landscape Legacy (Pimpernel Press, 2018), and now is chairman of the John Brookes-Denmans Foundation (JBDF) which she co-founded in 2017. The JBDF is dedicated to perpetuating John Brookes’ design legacy and to the renovation and preservation of Denmans Garden, his garden in West Sussex. She currently owns and runs Denmans Garden which includes a plant centre and retail space. She is also a contributor to the Georgetown Dish, a daily news and entertainment site, writing occasional articles about gardening and garden design. Ms. van Paasschen has compiled and edited How to Design a Garden, book of writings by John Brookes, published by Pimpernel Press in February 2022.