The Unit focuses on the philosophical and literary responses to ‘Nature’ of English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, relating the formal aesthetics of landscape and garden designs to the cultural and art historical contexts that inform them. The influence of writers such as Pliny, Horace and Virgil on the form and design of landscapes will be studied to determine why such Classical literature should have influenced plans in which architecture and planting, artfully disposed, replaced the flora and rigid formality of the previous fifty years. The contemporary theorists Pope, Addison and Shaftesbury and the garden practitioners Vanbrugh, Kent, Batty Langley, Lancelot Brown, Humphry Repton and J.C. Loudon are studied, as is the shift from Classicism  to Romanticisim.

The Italian Renaissance garden is at the root of western horticulture; this Unit traces the Italian Renaissance tradition from its origins in the walled Persian paradise park to its contemporary interpretations in the works of Cecil Pinsent, Geoffrey Jellicoe and Pietro Porcinai. In the fifteenth century, under the influence of newly discovered classical texts, the medieval hortus conclusus opened up to nature; Medici estates from the fortress, Il Trebbio, to the suburban Villa Medici demonstrate this shift from defensive enclosure to rural playground. In the early sixteenth century Bramante’s design for the Vatican’s Belvedere Court initiated a new concept of space, including axial layout, terracing and statuary.  By the seventeenth century the gardens had shifted from spaces of sensual delight to sites of scientific display and intellectual gamesmanship with dramatic fountains, theatrical automata and sophisticated allegorical programmes. The Palladian tradition is also examined, as is the nineteenth-century Renaissance Revival.

This is the first of two core mandatory units, which cover the history of landscape gardening in Britain. It will introduce students to the gentlemen amateurs and landscape professionals – the Gentlemen & Players – who shaped the English landed estate, followed in each instance by site visits to relevant surviving layouts. These gardens will be set chronologically against the social and political history of the period. The Unit will open with an assessment of the gardens of the early Stuart Court and continue through the experimental years of the Interregnum to the Franco-Dutch layouts of the Restoration. It was a time when new species were being introduced on an unprecedented scale and when the plants themselves were as important as the contrived framework that displayed them. The Unit will end as early eighteenth-century Arcadias brought in more natural and informal designs where the flora took on a subsidiary role to the landscape.

Optional Units

Historicism and eclecticism are the central themes of this unit, which examines the re-appearance of formal enclosures, ornamental rockeries and bedding plants and the Italian revival style.  Formality is also present in the emerging urban parks and botanical gardens, the result of pioneering Philanthropists like Josephy Strutt of Derby, which became the essential social ‘lungs’ of the great new industrial cities.  The new suburban cemeteries are explored as is the explosion of technology in iron and glass with the great greenhouses - Fowler’s Conservatory at Syon, Paxton’s Great Conservatory at Chatsworth and his Palm House at Kew, and  Biddulph Grange with its Chinese and Japanese structures which points to the re-emergence of garden buildings and the conscious mixing of plants and species.

These architectural gardens were conceived in order to project an aristocratic social life into the exterior ‘rooms’ of layouts where a homely cottage tradition was skilfully entwined around formal pavilions and terraces.   Gardens close to Bristol like Iford by Harold Peto, Barrow Court by Inigo Triggs and Hestercombe, the work of the brilliant partnership of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, are all easily accessible.   The Unit will explore the last stirrings of conventional English patriotism and examine that rearguard action of the monied and politically potent classes made in defence of privilege.   It will concentrate on the work of Lutyens and Jekyll and the aesthetic lives of the ‘Souls’ for which so many of these gardens were designed.

This Unit traces the evolution of twentieth century gardens, focusing on the interaction between horticulture and contemporary movements in architecture and art. It explores how Picasso’s Damoiselles d’Avignon, Cezanne’s Mt St Victoire, De Chirico’s Ariadne series, Kandinski’s abstractions and Mondrian’s De Stijl provided inspiration to garden designers.  While concentrating on British horticulture, the course will examine the roots of Modernist philosophy; the French leadership in garden design with the Vera Brothers, Gabriel Guevrekian, le Corbusier and the seminal 1925 Paris Art Deco exposition; 1930s British attempts at Modernism in such avant-garde villas as High and Over, Bentley Wood, and Joldwyns; America’s embracing of Modernism and post-war work of British designers Geoffrey Jellicoe, Beth Chatto, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Derek Jarman and Charles Jencks.

This Unit examines aspects of the history of plant cultivation and collection as they affect garden history, from early Botanic and Physic gardens, through the interest in new species imported to Europe.  Gardens such as the Chelsea Physic Garden, Kew and university and national botanic gardens, arboretum collections such as Westonbirt, and contemporary developments such as the Eden Project in Cornwall will be set in context.   The impact of botanical history, ecology, new plant introductions, new horticultural techniques and individual plant and Biodiversity conservation have all influenced garden design. Plant introductions and their exposure in botanical and private collections, together with aesthetics is an important aspect of understanding the cultural associations of landscaping and gardening, and informs both their evaluation as heritage and conservation and environmental  issues.

This Unit will examine the value, form and function of nature in French gardens during the period from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the Revolution in 1789. In parallel with the landscaping of English gardens during the eighteenth century, French gardens were similarly landscaped, often drawing upon English models. The unit will examine the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most vehement ‘voice of nature’ in eighteenth-century Europe, who conceived nature as a transcendent presence in the physical world, a force to be appreciated rather than mastered. The Arcadias created in France were often eclectic Edens of emblems and conceits. This unit will look at some of the most famous examples, notably: Ermenonville, Méréville, Monceau, and the jardin anglo-chinois of the Petit Trianon and the Hameau at Versailles.

This Unit explore the network of relationships between British gardens and their counterparts on the continent of Europe and in Ireland.   Each seminar will focus on a particular theme, including the sources of continental ideas in British garden design; the influence of Classical ideas via the Grant Tour;  the English landscape garden in Germany as exemplified at Wörlitz and in the work of Schinkel, Lenné and Sckell;  the gardens of wealthy Britons along the Rivieras and elsewhere in sunny climates;  the Irish landscape garden as a parallel experience;  and more broadly the ambivalence of British responses to European design ideas compared with, for example, successive waves of Anglomania in various parts of Europe.

This unit examines the evolution of the Islamic garden from its origins in the early Persian quadripartite garden, through its expression in the Moorish gardens of North Africa, the Hispano-Moorish gardens of Southern Spain, culminating in the Alhambra and Generalife, and the Moghul gardens of Northern India which reached their peak in the Taj Mahal.  The development of the Islamic garden was partly a response to Koranic descriptions of paradise, and partly a result of geographical, cultural and climatic conditions. Although European responses to these gardens varied widely depending on prevailing politics and philosophy, the Islamic garden had a profound influence European horticulture from the medieval hortus conclusus to Geoffrey Jellicoe’s 1980 paradise garden at Sutton Place; this too will be considered. 

This unit will explore the development of public spaces over the last two hundred years and place them within their social and historical context. The unit will begin by looking at the creation of garden cemeteries and finish with the 2004 CABE brochure, The Value of Public Space. Other areas to be discussed include the rise in public parks during the Victorian period, the garden city movement, the use of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll as designers for the Commonwealth War Grave Commission post-World War I, the change in ideas about land ownership, also as a result of World War I, and the subsequent National Parks movement, the development of countryside parks, new parks such as the Thames Barrier Park, London, and recent movements including the restoration of nineteenth-century parks as a result of  Heritage Lottery Funding.

This unit will explore the roles that women have played in the development of gardens over the past 400 years. From the richest woman in England, Bess of Hardwick, to the poorest weeder women, who essentially kept the gardens going, the input of women has been a varied but often overlooked contribution in garden history. Traditionally, women have been associated with ephemeral form of planting, rather than the substance of the structure. We shall investigate the validity of this, from the royal Queen Caroline through the aristocratic and gentry garden creators such as the Duchess of Portland, Lady Luxborough, Gertrude Jekyll, Norah Lindsay and Ellen Wilmott, to the women who had to beat their own path in the early twentieth century: Madeline Agar, Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe. The unit will also investigate the input of women’s literature and art.

This unit provides a short, intensive introduction to archaeologically-based techniques, materials and approaches relevant to garden historians. It provides students with basic skills in practical aspects of the subject to enable them to recognise and evaluate the evidence both of living and of ‘lost’ gardens. The unit will examine current approaches to management and conservation, and will explore topics such as restoration, recreation, access, conservation management plans and what is termed the ‘public value’ of any place. It will also review the reform of heritage protection which is intended to underpin a new Heritage Act in 2010.