Special to Road Trips for Gardeners
By The Garden Museum

We are delighted to announce this year’s Mollie Salisbury Cup, an annual award for garden memoirs sponsored by the Cecil family in memory of their mother, the 6th Marchioness of Salisbury and founding President of the Garden Museum. The memoir celebrates our personal experience of gardens – big or small, real or imaginary – and its theme changes each year.

This year’s theme is ‘Sanctuary’, inspired by our current exhibition, Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919-1939.

Candidates are invited to write up to 1500 words on the theme of ‘Sanctuary’, then pay the £10 registration fee on our website, and send entries to memoir@gardenmuseum.org.uk by Sunday 10 May. Winners will be notified by Friday 19 June 2020.
Prizes
First prize: £750, and their winning entry will be published in Hortus; two runners-up: £250 each.

All three winning entries will also be published on our website. You can read last year’s winners, on the theme of “The Problem with Gardening”, here. The winning entries from 2018, on the theme ‘My First Garden’, can be read here.
Judges

The Mollie Cup is judged by a member of the Cecil family, a Trustee of the Museum, and an independent author. This year the judges will be Lady Rose Cecil, the daughter of Lady Salisbury; Lady Egremont, Museum Trustee; and Alice Vincent, the author of the horticultural memoir Rootbound.

Mollie Salisbury (1922 – 2016) was a celebrated garden designer whose glorious creation at Hatfield House, the Jacobean Cecil family home in Hertfordshire, has won plaudits from critics and visitors alike. Despite having no conventional training, her careful study of contemporary houses in England and Europe, and of Hatfield’s archives, led to a garden with formal and informal elements.

She also created gardens for The Prince of Wales, Evgeny Lebedev and Peter Brant, as well as rooftops and balconies in London. Lady Salisbury worked tirelessly well into her eighties, and was an early campaigner for organic gardening. Her memoir, A Gardener’s Life (Frances Lincoln, 2007), tells her remarkable story.

(Photos courtesy of The Garden Museum)