An Invitation To Explore And Shape The Future

Easton Lodge broadens its activities each year, exploring the gardens’ history and linking to national and local events.

To reflect the campaigning zeal of Easton Lodge’s former owner – the passionately socialist Countess of Warwick – the 2007 theme commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Trading Faces, an ambitious collaborative summer education programme, peaked with the October Big Draw.

Over 1,000 school children decorated re-usable cloth bags with patterns inspired by adinkra symbols on Ghanaian Fairtrade chocolate wrappers.

This imagery also reflected their research into the life of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a freed Ghanaian slave who, while serving the 18th century miniature painter Richard Cosway, was the first African to write an abolitionist publication in English. Despite working for a portraitist, he remained faceless and unrecognised.

The pupils responded with a quest to examine identities through portraiture and Friendship Faces.

In the gardens, 400 people saw the exhibition of bags displayed on giant yew hedges and explored renewable resources.

Shape the Future workshops investigated carbon trading and sustainable energy, with visitors making green gear-driven machinery and cog patterns from leaves.