Advolly Richmond is an independent garden and social historian. She is a Trustee of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and a member of the Gardens Trust Events Committee, and the Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens Trust. She is also a member of the Garden Media Guild as well as being an Ambassador for Silent Space.
Zimbabwe
Horticulture is a second career for Richmond. She describes in an interview with Tamsin Westhorpe, Fresh from the Pod how she was working as a buyer in the auto industry in Derbyshire, but by the age of 40 wanted to do something different. She started studying with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in evening classes and achieved the level 2 certificate in horticulture, after which she and her husband relocated to Shropshire. At Reaseheath College, her plant identity lecturer Harry Delaney would tell the students about the history of the plants, and that sparked her interest. Delaney gave her lots of historical information on plant collectors, amongst that which was the history of landscape designers.
She joined the Work and Retrain as a Gardener Scheme (WRAG), which offers training and placements for those wishing to learn more about horticulture. She was placed with Noel Kingsburywho wrote about the scheme, with input from Richmond in an interview in The Telegraph. She then continued her studies in Garden History and Heritage Horticulture and went on to the University of Bristol where she was awarded an MA in Garden History. She has completed RHS training up to level 3 in Practical Horticulture.
Her areas of historical research include Capability Brown, Harare botanical gardens and nineteenth century African botanical stations. She provides Introduction to Garden History courses of varying lengths at several National Trust properties, and for the University of Birmingham via Winterbourne House and Gardens.
Richmond’s garden was featured on BBC 2 Gardener’s World in 2019. She has written about the gardens at Goldstone Hall in Shropshire for The English Garden magazine (January 2020). She regularly presents garden history segments on the flagship BBC Gardener’s World programme and is a frequent panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Gardener’s Question Time.
Richmond was a finalist in the Garden Media Guilds, Alan Titchmarsh New Talent Award in 2020
She is currently working on a life of Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman, a prominent nineteenth century Anglo-African Victorian missionary, botanist, and plant collector.
Another ongoing project is Richmond’s The Garden History Podcast – an A to Z which is widely available.
Richmond is a practical gardener, who confesses to having “probably far too many roses and a collection of snowdrops which kindly shares its space with a range of pre 1900 heritage daffodils.”
She lives in Shrewsbury with her husband, and is a jigsaw enthusiast.
https://advolly.co.uk/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advolly_Richmond
Credits (where info sourced from)
https://www.gardenmediaguild.co.uk/guild-members/directory/profile/Advolly-Richmond/600
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/18/kew-gardens-director-hits-back-at-claims-it-is-growing-woke
https://www.gardensillustrated.com/news/garden-media-guild-awards-shortlist-2020/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenprojects/8331402/Cultivating-a-second-career.html
