The Gardens Trust has published a report Harnessing Parks and Gardens in the 21st Century: How historic landscapes can support and enhance our today and tomorrow.
The Gardens Trust champions the crucial role parks and gardens have in creating and supporting a happy, healthy and prosperous society.
The report emphasizes that:
- parks and gardens are at the heart of our communities and national story but are often taken for granted or undervalued;
- these historic designed landscapes have a key role in meeting the challenges of today, particularly around meeting the need for growth and housing whilst not sacrificing the health of communities;
- historic parks and gardens have a critical role to play in nature recovery and helping combat the effects of climate change, by providing established habitats and being highly effective for carbon capture and sequestration.
It calls for help achieving our aims of:
- celebrating that we are a nation of gardens and gardeners, recognised and admired across the world;
- better recognition and protection for our historic legacy of parks and gardens, by improving control and consents and aligning their treatment with other heritage assets;
- increased awareness that thousands of high-quality parks, gardens and other designed landscapes already exist and require skilled maintenance and management;
- investment in the conservation and care of historic green spaces, so that they can continue to support communities for generations to come;
- improving the quantity and quality of expertise available to local planning authorities in historic designed landscapes, through improved training of conservation officers, planning teams and better-connected external advice;
- new guidance and investment to ensure that historic designed landscapes can be harnessed to fulfil their potential in addressing key challenges of our time such as communities’ health and wellbeing, social cohesion, climate change and nature recovery;
- a more holistic and joined-up role for the Gardens Trust, stretching beyond our work commenting on planning applications, enabling our expertise to fully support positive development, economic growth and conserving our green heritage for future generations.
