Earlier this year Gilly Drummond was awarded the prestigious Gold Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society in recognition ofherwork for the County Garden Trusts. Until recently, Gilly Drummond was Chairman of the Hampshire Gardens Trust and the dynamic force behind the development of Garden Trusts as a nationwide organisation able to call on a skilled and well informed membership dedicated to the conservation of historic gardens and to promoting the creation of high-quality new ones to enhance the environment. It is, then, worth looking at the Trusts and identifying the role they do or can play in local research and conservation.

Garden Trusts or as they are more usually known, County Garden Trusts, began with the formation of the Hampshire Gardens Trust in 1984 with Gilly Drummond as founder chairman. There are now Trusts in many counties with a large group of over 20 coming together in the Association of Garden Trusts, a national co-ordinating body. Interest in forming Garden Trusts extends across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland running in parallel with the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust. Clearly, there is some overlap between the interests of the Garden History Society and the County Garden Trusts but where the Trusts differ is in their close association with their local area, the county, and in the practical projects and on-site recording which many of them undertake.

The Hampshire Gardens Trust can be taken as an example of the work and approach of many throughout the country. The Trust states its objectives clearly: To help care for Hampshire’s gardens andparks at riskfrom neglect or inappropriate development. To help children learn about the environment through improvements to schoolgrounds. To help create new gardens and parks. The importance of this approach is the careful balance between the conservation of existing historic sites and the creation of new gardens and landscapes.

This approach is an example of the active interaction of many of the Trusts with the local environment and of the emphasis which they place on education, and particularly on the education of the young as the next generation of gardeners and conservators. In Hampshire the Trust has developed a ‘Gardens for Learning’ book designed to help schools develop their gardens and grounds which also

Judith Roberts looks at conservation and the role of the County Garden

Trusts

acts as a source of information for sponsors.

The Trust works hard to achieve sponsorship for its projects and it is frequently able to help schools with awards towards the cost of making new gardens. One school was awarded £300 towards the cost of a garden extension to the school hail and most sums are between £1 50 and £500. This and the Trust’s award certificate provide a very active encouragement for other schools and there are now many schools making gardens, some of which include quiet areas for picnics or act as a quiet area for parents to wait at the end of the school day. The Trust awards its own certificate, as well as giving financial aid, and looks for a high standard of planting and design and particularly encourages the inclusion of sculpture, such as a story-teller’s chair in the garden at Bishopswood Infant School. It has also worked with the artist-in-residence at Norwood Primary School, Eastleigh, to design and make a tiled centre piece for a new ‘Butterfly and Insect Garden’. This work has exactly the right focus and scale. It is always a good idea to encourage children to look at the wider landscape but it is an even better one to engage them in the creation of something they can see and use everyday. From this there is a good chance that their awareness will deepen and widen and that the Trust will achieve its aim, not only of enhancing the school landscape,

but of fostering the next generation of garden and landscape conservators.

There is, of course, work to be encouraged in other educational areas and here Hampshire Gardens Trust has developed a Student Award of £100. This year the award was divided between two students to help with the preparation of dissertations; one student is compiling a booklet for children on what to look for when they are visiting gardens; the other focuses on a project concerned with the development of school gardens. In Devon, there have been other initiatives and here the Trust works closely with Exeter University in the promotion of research into historic parks and gardens. The Trust has already supported Dr Todd Grey in an exhaustive search and cataloguing of archive sources for Devon gardens, which is now published in book form by Exeter University Press. Soon the work of its Research Committee will be advanced by the appointment of a Devon Gardens Trust Research Student, a post created by Exeter University, part funded by English Heritage and part underwritten by the Trust. The student will work on a specffic research topic looking at the history and significance of public parks in Devon, an area of academic research which will directly inform the conservation of the contemporary urban landscape.

Like Devon, manyTrusts are actively engaged in researching and recording historic gardens. In Warwickshire, for example, the Gardens Trust volunteers work in close association with volunteers from the National and Decorative Fine Art Association and the County Archivist in cataloguing material relating to the development of historic parks in the county, as well as material which sheds light on the development of the urban garden and gardening practices in general.

Research is not confined to archive work; many Trusts are also actively engaged in site survey work and in the compilation of lists of historic parks and gardens together with catalogues of particular features or plants. The Isle of Wight Gardens Trust, for example, is working closely with the Isle of Wight Council on a number of projects including the preparation of a policy on the historic landscape in the Unitary

Landscape Trust has just finalised arrangements with the Cotswold District Council for a Partnership

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