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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.

Styles / Topics

Exploring how Jane Austen presents, and subtly comments on, the Picturesque in Sense and Sensibility, through the creation of both character and dialogue.

People

William Robinson (1835–1935) was apparently responsible for the design of only one garden, Gravetye Manor in Sussex, but his influence is still felt today.

Places

The gardens at Levens Hall are best known as the home of the world’s oldest topiary garden, an extraordinary collection of ancient box and yew trees sculpted into abstract and geometric shapes.

Topics

Was it simply an item of garden equipment or instead a weapon of war?

Places

The beautiful Grade II* listed Georgian garden at Painswick features a fantastical landscape of deceptive vistas, serpentine paths, pools, woodlands, follies and a grand formal vegetable garden.

Places

Catrina Fenton, head of the Heritage Seed Library at charity Garden Organic, explains more about this unique ‘living library’ of heritage vegetables – which in 2025 is celebrating its 50th anniversary

Topics

Long before solar panels and smart irrigation, a different kind of energy was being quietly trialled in gardens across Europe: electricity.

Periods / Styles

Rooted in Enlightenment thinking and the rise of the picturesque, Georgian gardens became spaces where nature was artfully framed rather than tamed.

Periods

Monasteries, castles, the rich and the poor all had gardens in medieval times but what did they look like and what did they grow?