History Hub Listings Archive - Page 5 of 9

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

Periods

Interwar Gardens

The Interwar Years (1918–1939) marked a pivotal shift in garden design, as landscapes responded to both personal grief and broader cultural transformation.

Periods

The Victorian Garden

Victorian gardens offer a window into a world where nature, design, and innovation came together in dazzling harmony.

Styles

The Hortus Conclusus

What springs to mind when you think about medieval gardens? Probably monks, monasteries and herbs first but you might remember seeing people sitting in a walled or hedged garden.

Periods

Medieval Gardens

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

Periods / Styles

Georgian Garden Design

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

Topics

Electroculture

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

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

Places

Painswick Rococo Garden

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.

Topics

Wheelbarrows

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

Places

Levens Hall

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.

People

William Robinson

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.

Styles / Topics

Jane Austen and the Picturesque

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

Styles

The English Landscape Garden

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

Topics

Threats to Parks and Gardens

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

People

William Gilpin and the Picturesque in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

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.