Championing historic gardens

The Historic Gardens Foundation is a small, dynamic NGO that champions important places across the globe. It operates through a worldwide network of garden enthusiasts and a handsome 50-page journal, published twice a year. I was delighted and honoured last year to become a director of the organisation.

We have just launched a new version of our website to mark the Foundation’s 20th anniversary. www.historicgardens.org offers access to chosen articles from the journal, book reviews, and news stories on historic gardens around the world.

Gillian Mawrey, founder and president of the Foundation, describes our work as:

“a hotbed of historical research, sheer pleasure and campaigning for conservation. We’re based in London, but we seek to raise the profile of important gardens all over the world. I don’t think there is an organisation anywhere doing what we do. I couldn’t imagine when we started twenty years ago that we would have uncovered such a level of local support and a wealth of information on gardens from Israel to India, Melbourne to Massachusetts.”

Do go and take a look at the new website. You can browse through a back issue of the journal (which includes an article I wrote on a forgotten French designer) and see a glimpse of the regular newsletter for subscribers.

We hope that the 20th anniversary will encourage even more garden lovers to work with us to research, champion and protect historic sites all over the world – and to join our existing network of subscribers located in forty different countries.