Garden History

MA in Garden History

Mode: part-time

Celebrating a decade of successful teaching, this MA degree is taught primarily by Professor Mowl, together with contributions from staff in the departments of Archaeology and Anthropology and History of Art and visiting lecturers in the field of Garden and Landscape History.

The focus is on an integrated approach to designed landscapes and gardens within their cultural and social contexts through archaeology, architectural history, horticulture, aesthetics and philosophy.

With a Humphry Repton landscape garden at its centre, its own Botanical Garden, and the eighteenth-century Goldney garden famous for its grotto with all its shells, crystals, statuary and waterworks, the University of Bristol starts with some inherited advantages for offering a course in Garden History. Nearby there is also a large Tudor deer park at Ashton Court and a virtually untouched picturesque layout at Blaise Castle within the city limits, and within easy reach around Bristol there are numerous important Cotswolds, Somerset and Wiltshire parks and gardens. Some are well known like Stourhead and the Painswick Rococo Garden; others are unfamiliar masterpieces, such as Stancombe's Wagnerian secret valley with its tunnels and Temple of Love, Piercefield with its vertiginous precipice walk, or the Edwardian garden at Barrow Court designed as if for lavish open air living in the style of that bohemian coterie, The Souls.

Programme Structure

First Semester
You must complete three core units:

• The Archaeology of Gardens
• The Formal Garden (1620 - 1720)
• Landscape: Art, Aesthetics, Ideologies

Second Semester
You must complete one core units:

• Classical Arcadia and the Gardenesque (1720 - 1820)

plus two options from the following list:

• Contemporary Gardens
• The Edwardian Garden (1890 - 1914)
• European Exchanges: Continental Influences and English Gardens Abroad
• Horticulturalists and Botanists
• The Italian Renaissance Garden
• Nature and Landscape in the French Garden (1715 - 1789)
• The Paradise and Islamic Garden
• Renaissance and Renaissance Revivals in Italian Gardens
• A Social History of Public Spaces since 1800
• Twentieth-century Gardens
• The Victorian Garden (1820 - 1890)