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History Hub

Exploring Garden History

Discover the people, places, styles and stories that have shaped our historic landscapes. The History Hub brings together resources from across the Gardens Trust to help you explore centuries of garden design, from visionary designers to iconic sites and enduring traditions.

Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon. Claude Lorrain, 1680.

Articles

You can filter our history hub using the categories below to view People, Places and Styles. We’ll be adding other ways to explore our History Hub as it grows.

People

Known for his visionary “Red Books” that combined art, narrative and design, Repton’s work bridged the grandeur of Capability Brown with a more intimate, picturesque style that endures in the English landscape today.

Places

A walk round this exceptional English landscape garden made by Henry Hoare in the mid-18th century demonstrating many of the design principles that distinguished this type of garden from the very formal gardens of the 17th century.

Topics

Parks and gardens contain lots of interesting features, many of which may have been built years, decades or centuries ago. How many can you spot in your local park or garden and when do you think they were created?

Places

A unique site with four complete period gardens including 17th century, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian gardens.

People

In a time when women were expected to stay in the drawing room, Ellen Ann Willmott (1858–1934) was digging in the dirt, often quite literally reshaping the landscape of British gardening.

Places

Imagine stepping into a garden where history lingers in the air, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert once found solace amid vibrant blooms. Osborne House on the Isle of Wight is more than just a former royal residence – it’s a place where nature and history intertwine, creating an atmosphere that feels both grand and intimate.

People

The Picturesque was a very popular idea in the mid to late eighteenth century, initially focussing on viewing the natural landscape as if it were a picture in a frame, although it later evolved into a more complex set of aesthetic ideals and influenced fashions in English landscape garden design.

Topics

Each year parks and gardens face a range of modern-day threats that can compromise their value and long-term survival.

Styles

The English Landscape Garden developed throughout the eighteenth century and has been called our greatest contribution to art and culture.