I had felt an urge to change my trajectory, and life as a practising landscape architect seemed to be where it was heading, but that wasn’t quite to be…
Once at university I got bitten by the research bug and never quite left. Or to be more specific, I became fascinated in the history of the knowledge, values and ideas that are bound up in the discipline of landscape architecture.
So, following my master’s I undertook a PhD supervised by Dr Jan Woudstra on a 20th century forester and environmentalist, Richard St. Barbe Baker, which I completed in 2021, titled The Making of the Man of the Trees. Around the time that I was finishing my doctorate, Jan and I edited The Politics of Street Trees which brought together interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the issue for which Sheffield for a time was notorious. In 2022-23 I also worked as tutor on the University of Oxford’s English Landscape Garden course and as a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project, Women of the Welfare Landscape, led by Professor Luca Csepely-Knorr at the University of Liverpool. The project explored and celebrated the legacy of landscape architect Brenda Colvin and her peers as they helped shape the post-war practice of landscape architecture.
