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Learning Activities

Learning Through Gardens: Suggestions for Teachers

Gardens and parks have enriched people’s lives throughout history. For thousands of years they have not only supplied us with food and medicine, but have also provided space for our relaxation and pleasure. This website provides a range of learning materials that help pupils to find out about the enduring relationship between people and gardens.

Any one of the following three approaches could form a useful focus for pupils' learning

Approach 1: 'Garden design through time'

The website provides a chronological timeline that relates garden design to different periods and civilizations throughout history. The timeline helps pupils to develop an understanding of the changes and continuities in garden design. It explores the social and cultural context in which gardens were created and used, enabling pupils to develop a ‘long view’ of garden design and reinforcing their chronological understanding. Pupils can be encouraged to think about the characteristic features of different periods that influenced garden design. They can also analyse the factors that contributed to change: people’s ideas and beliefs, science and technology, individual genius, wealth and power.

Suggested learning activities

Approach 2: 'Gardens and people'

Gardens are not just case studies in design. They are stories of people’s lives. By exploring the meaning of gardens to people in different times and places pupils can learn a lot about other cultures and about people’s lives in different periods of history. Why did water feature so prominently in Islamic gardens? How did the renaissance garden reflect wider changes in society? What lay behind the creation of public parks in the nineteenth century? These questions can provide starting points for developing an understanding of the diversity and complexity of past societies. Most exciting of all, the website allows pupils to explore the ways in which ideas, plants, designs, tools and customs flow from one culture to another: How did the Roman Empire change what people ate? How much did medieval gardeners learn from the Islamic world? What was the impact of nineteenth-century empire on European gardens? An exploration of the ways in which many cultures, from all over the world, have influenced garden history can help to create a sense of shared identity.

Suggested learning activities

Approach 3: 'Investigating gardens'

The website provides pupils with a range of sources, linked to specific case studies of individual gardens and parks. Plans, photograph and texts allow pupils to become real garden historians by investigating a particular garden or park for themselves. The documents can be used to develop pupils’ skills in handling historical evidence. They could form the basis for investigations into the layout and design of the original site, the way in which the site has changed over time, the role of key people in the development of the park or garden, the nature of the planting in different periods and the way in which the park or garden had been interpreted.

Suggested learning activities

Provided by Michael Riley, Somerset LEA History Adviser

Refer to the complete Source Text for 'The Story of Gardens', including a general Bibliography.

Further book and web-references are given in the Garden Case Studies.

Other useful links for the History of Gardens:


 
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