Research & Record

Get Involved!

You do not have to be an expert on garden or landscape history to get involved in the Parks & Gardens UK project (although experts are welcome to volunteer too!). To help with the project, you could:

- Research the history of a park or garden in your area, or contribute research that you have already done.

- Create a profile of a person who has been historically associated with a park or garden. Input data for other site records.

- Write an article on a garden history theme for the website.

- Take digital photos of parks, gardens, historic garden features and other artefacts.

If you are not already a member of a Gardens Trust or similar organisation, we would like to put you in touch with your nearest group, where you will find help and support from other garden researchers. But you are welcome to register with us individually if you prefer.

If you need training on how to carry out research and recording of historic parks and gardens, we can help with that too. For those who are totally new to the subject, we provide an Overview of Research and Recording Practice online. 

We welcome volunteers adding and editing records in the database, and we will guide you on how to do this. Alternatively, you can send us the information and we can enter if for you. If you have not entered records onto the database before, you will need a user name and password to access it. To register for data entry please email and include the word 'register' in the subject line. 

Forms and information

Volunteer Timesheets and the Volunteer Training Manual and Researchers' Resource Guide can be downloaded from the Downloads area in the menu.

Tell us about your research!

We are interested to learn about what you are researching and would like to share it on our website. Please send us a paragraph describing your project and we will feature it for you.