ECSO starts cooperation with The London Gardener

Study trips played a key role in the 19th century education of the craft of gardening but also garden design. The most important in Eduard’s education is considered to be his trip to Great Britain in the spring of 1847. The need for a study trip to Britain was prompted by recommendations from Prince Hermann v. Pückler-Muskau and Jacob Heinrich Rehder, under whose tutelage Eduard took his first professional steps.

At the end of May 1847, Eduard set off with the Hereditary Grand Duke Carl Friedrich von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (his employer at the time), Duke’s wife and closest members of his court on a nearly month-long journey to London. During his visit, Eduard visited numerous gardens in the UK capital and nearby residences. The long list of places Eduard visited includes the gardens of Buckingham Palace, which are not open to the public, and Windsor Castle, where he spent four days as a guest of Queen Victoria.

Eduard’s particularly valuable memories of his time in London include his observations of the flora of the parks there, which permanently shaped his later design workshop. By his own admission, his experiences of visiting Claremont Park, for example, influenced many of his projects in the Netherlands. The magnificent gardens at Chiswick, Hampton Court, Holland House … are just a few of the places out of nearly 30 that Eduard recalls in his memoirs published in 1890.

We would like to remind you of this remarkable story in collaboration with The London Gardener where we will publish articles in 3 volumes of Annual. The letter of intent was signed in London by Łukasz Przybylak, Co-founder of ECSO, and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Editor of the London Gardener.

The London Gardener – the annual journal of the London Gardens Trust, published since 1995 – is a pioneer of the new garden history, pushing out the envelope and redefining the subject’s boundaries. Encouraged by its founder and editor, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, its authors find extraordinary material where previously it had been overlooked. The publication is easy to misapprehend: its appearance – small in stature, two columns, black and white, Caslon typeface – is a witty take on eighteenth-century journals such as The Gentleman’s Magazine and The Spectator, but its contents rarely represent less than first-class academic research. With explorations of little-known sites, obscure individuals and unimagined connections, or offering new perspectives on more familiar people and places, The London Gardener has consistently shone a highly individual sidelight on the myriad-faceted nature of the metropolis’s parks and gardens.

Find out more about The London Gardener and The London Gardens Trust.