About

This lecture by Dr. Ekaterina Heathdraws on her recent book, Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia: Empress Maria Feodorovna's Pavlovsk Park (1777–1828) (Bloomsbury, 2026), will explore the political life of Russia's largest landscape garden. We will encounter monuments built to flatter a dangerous mother-in-law, tree plantings that encoded succession agreements, and diplomatic gifts displayed in the garden as proof of international alliances.

Hidden among Pavlovsk's landscapes was also an experiment in social control. Maria Feodorovna believed that a landowner should be able to observe, and quietly guide, the lives of her peasants. She built elevated viewpoints from which visitors could watch serfs at work, designed a model village whose circular layout placed every household in view, and commissioned a working farm nearby. At a moment when her son, Alexander I, was debating the abolition of serfdom, Pavlovsk became a living argument for preserving the existing order.

After the Napoleonic Wars the estate filled with military veterans who served as guides, hermits in garden pavilions, and boatmen on the park's rivers, staged figures in a landscape designed to resemble an Elysian paradise. What appeared to be a picturesque garden was simultaneously a welfare institution and a theatre of imperial memory.

This talk reveals how one woman used a garden as a means of practising politics through other means.

Dr Ekaterina Heath is a historian of gardens and visual culture with a particular interest in the movement of plants across empires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her research explores how plants acquired new meanings as they travelled between continents, and how gardens functioned as spaces of diplomacy and political expression. Her publications have examined topics including botanical diplomacy, plant collecting, the representation of plants in art, women and gardens in imperial Russia, and the role of gardens in shaping political relationships. Her recent book, Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia, explores how Empress Maria Feodorovna used Pavlovsk Park to influence politics and articulate her ideas.

Contact: Michaela Hill  0413265110

Date

Location

Online event access details will be provided by the event organiser

Contact Event Organiser