Garden Tour Great Success
By: Martin McGann

At the end of spring semester 14 students had a wonderful opportunity to travel to England with Martin McGann, Dan Stearns and Jamie Smith as part of the first ever study abroad course in landscape contracting. This trip was made possible in part through the assistance of the college and university Study Abroad Offices. Billed as the 2005 Garden Tour of England our intrepid travelers flew out of Philadelphia to London on May 16th and spent their first day of ten days in England visiting Hampton Court and doing some informal sightseeing. London and the surrounding areas provided opportunities to visit gardens such as Kew, St. James Park, and the Chelsea Physic Garden, cultural sites like the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abby and other sites such as the Millennium Ferris Wheel, Picadilly Circus, the Underground and Broadway shows.

The beautiful sunny weather experienced the first two days seemed to good to last, which it didn’t, however that didn’t slow down any of the scheduled trips. In fact, the group visited, on average, two significant sites each day for their entire trip (rain or shine). This required traveling by van and staying in Winchester, Bath and Oxford, which were exciting to visit in themselves, however the group still seemed to enjoy the gardens best. Some of the more popular sites were Stourhead, a landscape designed in the English Landscape style (circa 1750); Hidcote designed and constructed by Lawrence Johnson in the mid 20th century; Sissinghurst with its mix of Tudor architecture and garden rooms created by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930’s & 40’s; and the medieval Tor just outside of Glastonbury(pictured left). The general consensuses after the trip was over is that everyone would go back in a minute. With this type on enthusiasm the landscape contracting program will be trying to arrange another study abroad course for spring semester 2007. A final destinations is not fixed but northern Italy, France and Ireland are being considered.