CGL's Fields of Research

Since its foundation in 2002, the CGL has pursued the connections between religion and garden culture with great intensity, starting with the doctoral scholarships on religion and the history of garden culture, which were made possible in 2003/04 by the Hanover Monastery Chamber. This line of research has been consistently expanded through the symposium "Nature and Perception of Landscape in German-language Jewish and Christian Literature of the Early 20th Century" and the research project "Via Porta - Ecumenical Pilgrimage Volkenroda - Waldsassen" financed by the German Federal Foundation for the Environment.

Travel literature in all its breadth and at different times, from the travelogues of court gardeners to literary and tourist travelogues, to utopian journeys, has been given special attention at the CGL for several years. The focus is on the reception and communication of gardens and parks and their imaginative potential, inscribed and preserved in the knowledge of literature. This field of research also results from the interdisciplinary orientation of the CGL. It was decisively initiated and promoted by the literary scholars H. Fischer and S. Thielking. In 2013, the research and edition project "Der Reisebericht der Heinrich Ludolph Wendland von 1820" (The Travelogue of Heinrich Ludolph Wendland from 1820), sponsored by the VGH Foundation, was started.

From the very beginning, great attention was paid to questions of current landscape architecture and the present and future significance of landscape architecture and garden culture. Since modern landscape architecture and historical developments are closely linked, almost all events that focused on contemporary landscape architecture also include historical reviews from which insights for the future can be gained. In 2014 the volume "Zukunft aus Landschaft gestalten" (Designing the Future from Landscape), edited by H. Fischer (CGL-Studies Volume 17), was published. It contains numerous keywords on landscape architecture that experts have thought about.

From the very beginning, great importance was also attached to the conservation of garden monuments in theory and practice. Various events as well as individual volumes of the CGL studies, such as "Gartendenkmalpflege zwischen Konservieren und Rekonstruieren" (Garden monument conservation between conservation and reconstruction) (Volume 9, 2011) and "Der Garten als Kunstwerk - Der Garten als Denkmal" (The garden as work of art - The garden as monument) (Volume 10, 2012), as well as workshops, for example on the university education situation at landscape architecture training centres in Germany, carried out in 2003 in cooperation with Cord Panning, Director of the "Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau" Foundation in Muskau, or "Klosterliche Kulturlandschaftsforschung" (Monastic cultural landscape research) (2006), funded by the Hanover Monastery Chamber.

Herrenhausen and Hanover in their regional, national and international horticultural contexts are "obvious" research tasks for the CGL in the literal sense. The activities range from the preparation of an exhibition on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the renewal of the Great Garden in 2007, inspired at the time by the director of the Herrenhausen Gardens, Dipl.-Ing. Ronald Clark, to studies on the work and influence of the heads of the Hanoverian green space administration, founded in 1890, to the organisation of the conference "Herrenhausen in International Comparison", which took place in May 2011 in the Orangery. In connection with the research field of Hannover and Herrenhausen, the research programme "Royal Herrenhausen Garden Library" should be emphasised, which has been carried out in close cooperation with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library since 2009 and was funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony.