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On 1 January 2007 Tim was granted significant and generous additional funding from the Leverhulme Trust to continue his Historic Gardens of England Project. This nationwide survey will research ten further counties between 2006 and 2012 in order to produce ten more books to add to the six already published. Based at the University of Bristol, this project will be led by Tim under the aegis of the Institute of Garden and Landscape History.
The Times Higher Education Supplement highlighted the Historic Gardens & Landscapes of England Project on 5 January 2007:
"A Bristol Academic has won £314,411 to undertake what must be one of the most pleasant research endeavours in any academic field. Having visited more than 540 historic gardens in Gloucestershire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Cornwall and Worcestershire, Timothy Mowl has now been funded by the Leverhulme Trust to document the historically significant gardens in England. He first recognised the need for a Pevsner-style analysis of England’s historic gardens and landscapes seven years ago while writing a course book for the university’s Garden History MA students. But although the Pevsner architectural guides, which were begun in the 1950s by the great architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, were famous for their detail, they simply listed architectural facts and forsook personal stories and chronology."
Claire Sanders, Who got that cash?
This follows a grant that Tim received in 2004, also from the Leverhulme Trust, which has funded the writing and research of Historic Gardens of Cornwall, Historic Gardens of Worcestershire and Historic Gardens of Oxfordshire , which is to be published in May 2007.
"Among the delights of Tim Mowl's books are his forcefully expressed likes and dislikes, among the latter being puce, pink and purple rhododendrons, acid-yellow azaleas, and sensation seeking National Trust visitors... He writes well and engagingly, delights in turning a phrase, and in this ongoing series of county garden histories is emerging as one of the best topographical writers of his generation... As Mowl notes, 'any book claiming to be a history of English gardens will be a series of generalisations shot through with multiple exceptions', and the great value of his county-by-county surveys...as well as those by Tom Williamson and others, is that clarity and depth is being added to overviews such as those by Miles Hadfield and Christopher Hussey. One idea, however, which it would be good to nip in the bud, is that Mowl is doing a Pevsner for gardens. The good Doktor's forty-six volumes (as Mowl himself has explored in his Stylistic Cold Wars of 2000) are, within their compass, comprehensive, terse and largely impersonal gazeteers. Mowl, on the other hand, produces chronological syntheses - and extremely good ones they are too." Paul Stamper, English Heritage
Opposite: Satyr by John Van Nost at Venus' Vale, Rousham
In addition to the gardens series Tim has recently published a major biography of the eighteenth-century landscape designer and architect, William Kent entitled: William Kent - Architect, Designer, Opportunist (Jonathan Cape, 2006; Pimlico paperback, 2007). His latest architectural study of his own city: Bristol - City on the Edge, was published by Frances Lincoln in October 2006.
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