About 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.

The aim of taking The London Gardener online is to make the journal and its contents more widely available to a much greater audience across the metropolis, the UK and abroad, and to do so at no cost to the membership of the Trust and for the benefit – for free – of anyone and everyone who has an interest in the role of landscape in the history of this great city.

The cost of taking the journal online has been generously underwritten by the Deborah Loeb Brice Donor Advised Fund at CAF and the Finnis Scott Foundation.

The Trust shall continue to publish The London Gardener. The online journal will not supersede the present physical publication, which will be distributed at no cost to members of the Trust.

The London Gardens Trust

The London Historic Parks and Gardens Trust, now abbreviated to the London Gardens Trust (LGT), was launched as an independent charitable trust at the Chelsea Flower Show in May 1994. It is the county gardens trust for Greater London, and its objectives, as laid out in its Memorandum and Articles of Association, are as follows:

• To promote the education of the public on matters connected with the arts and sciences of historic garden land;
• To preserve, enhance and re-create for the education and enjoyment of the public, whatever historic garden land may exist or have existed in and around London.

The LGT has become a well-established organisation with a strong voice in the promotion and protection of London’s historic green open spaces. Among its greatest achievements are the establishment of the following:

• London Open Gardens (formerly Open Garden Squares Weekend; est. 1998) which has encouraged hundreds of thousands of visitors from London, the UK and abroad to explore hundreds of the capital’s normally private and lesser-known or hidden green spaces, ranging from private squares to rooftops and modest but extraordinary town gardens. (https://londongardenstrust.org/whatson/open-gardens/)
• London Gardens Trust Inventory (compiled from 1995, and online from 2012) is a comprehensive, online resource which documents the history and local significance of over 2,500 parks, gardens and other landscapes across London’s thirty-three boroughs that help make the metropolis such an enjoyable place to live in and explore. This resource is freely available to the public.

Support for The London Gardener

Since the first issue, publication of The London Gardener has been made possible through the generosity of benevolent individuals and charitable organisations, as listed below:

• Anonymous Private Benefactor
• The Aldama Foundation
• Mr Philip Craig / Philip & Diane Craig
• The Executors of the Estate of the late Fiona Crumley
• The Deborah Loeb Brice Donor Advised Fund at CAF
• J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust
• Nicholas and Judith Goodison’s Charitable Settlement
• Historic Royal Palaces
• Dennis & Sigrid Hotz
• The Idlewild Trust
• Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine Kaye Foundation
• Jonathan Keates Esq.
• Pierre & Catherine Lagrange
• The Leche Trust
• The Monument Trust
• The Oliver Ford Foundation
• The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• The Rothschild Foundation
• The Sargent Charitable Trust
• The Finnis Scott Foundation
• Waterers Landscape