Garden History Research Degree Opportunities

No – I know it’s not Saturday but….I’m going to break my own rules just for once because I want to invite you to join me for a free on-line “open evening” next Tuesday, 25th June at 6.30 to discover more about garden history research, and in particular about the only research degree in the subject in the country which I help to run.

If you can’t make that date or time, don’t worry, it’s going to be recorded and will be available [via a link on here] until the course actually starts in October.

Lots of people talk to me about researching Garden History, but many of them think its all about grand gardens owned by posh people, or statues, topiary and garden design, or maybe that they need a lot of knowledge about plants or practical horticulture.

It’s not. You can study garden history like that if you want but you can also investigate it through philosophy, poetry, economics, cartography, ecology, architecture, garden writing, politics, social history, science, art, archaeology or even pulp fiction -and probably in many other ways too. In short it’s a really interdisciplinary way of investigating the world of gardens and designed landscapes.

The Gardens Trust is really pleased to be supporting Buckingham University’s MA research degree and PhD opportunities which began last year and run from the university’s central London base with me as course director. We’re just coming to the end of our first year with about a dozen students working on their MAs and 4 more on PhDs.

We’ve got students from a wide range of backgrounds, including young professionals as well as those pursuing their interests later in life. The range of their research subjects is equally wide. From a study of estate lodges to the recreation of an Edwardian Japanese garden; from the impact of the First World War on local parks to the career and significance of a 17thc Dutch gardener; from the effect of biodegradation on historic garden features to the history of planting plans. And obviously much more besides.

We’re now busy recruiting for the coming academic year which starts at the beginning of October. The programme runs on Thursday evenings from 6.30 to 8.00 and is based around a series of chronological case studies of significant historic gardens and landscapes, which will be run by a mix of owners and leading professionals. These will be backed up by a series of background lectures on each period and sometimes even on specific sites, together with four day visits at weekends to important sites, as well as a day on research skills. Next year I’m being joined as course director by Twigs Way, who will be well known to many of you as an author, lecturer and consultant.

The open evening will explain a bit more about the course , and Twigs and I will be joined by Professor John Adamson, Director of the Humanities Research Institute at Buckingham who will be able to answer any questions you might have on the administrative side of the course.