��������Ƶ

Blogpost by Cécilé Bruyet (Centre for Urban History)

28/5/2026 

To be read

February 2026, I receive messages from colleagues: “There is movement in the courtyard”; “Hofstad is coming back to life”; “students are busy again”. Yes, it’s time for a new edition of Hofstad. However abandoned the courtyard of ‘t Brantijser may have looked like for a couple of semesters, when the second semester of even years begins, suddenly, the small square of earth and weeds becomes a topic of interest, raising the spirit of belonging that students and workers alike have with their building. “Do you remember when we did Hofstad” is a sentence you would hear often whenever Antwerp-trained researchers talk about Hofstad. So what is it that happens to leave such strong memories? What is “doing Hofstad”?

Teaching history with hands in the dirt

The class on Environmental History from professor Tim Soens comes with a twist, as students from second and third year BA-History have to write unusual papers. While students learn about past agriculture, climate and famine in the aula, they experiment with the topics on a much more practical level through the assignment. Source criticism and historiography are on the menu, but the methodology somewhat differs, as students have to garden starting from sources ranging from gardening treaties to interviews conducted through the method of Oral History, and several garden plans from across centuries.

A variety of sources, thus, for a variety of questions: Who had gardens and what did they use them for? What did people eat in the past? How did rural or urban contexts impact the garden set-up? How did people cope with climate variability? The source criticism targets the implementation of the historical documents into gardening today, a process which rises more questions than it answers, on which students are invited to reflect: which variety should one use when gardening historically? Which tools and which technics? What kind of fertilizer would be more accurate?

More often than not, students realise that creativity rather than gardening skills are necessary to put historical sources in practice with what is available. For example, one group had to garden using Art Inventories from seventeenth-century Antwerp in their assignment on flower gardens in the early modern city. The source appears far from the topic, and yet, it entails lists of flower beds and bulbs in the courtyards of the Tassis family. From there, students used literature to mimic an ornamental garden in an urban setting – hence the walls around –, planted flowers found in the source, and used paintings from Rubens to recreate the geometry with a fountain in its centre. The research process works similarly in all groups, if it is a poem or a pamphlet on gardening, a description of a known garden or a pupil’s notes from gardening class. But is such reflective process sufficient to make people recall “doing Hofstad” years later?

Historical gardening as collective experience

For several students, Hofstad is usually their first experience with gardening. This means not only selecting and planting seeds, but also care for fragile seedlings and pay attention to the weather, to snails and other “danger” to their crops. For some of them, more importantly, it is the first time they harvest something edible that they have put efforts into.

However small it might be, I believe that the collective experience of independence from agro-industrial horticulture is what makes Hofstad so special. If students had to survive from the harvest, they would of course starve, as the garden is fairly small and they are around 150 of them. Yet, they leave the course not only with knowledge on historical sources and what they might tell us or not about vegetable patches in the past, but also with basic knowledge on gardening, and especially, a sense of pride.

“Our garden”, “we planted”, “we cared together for the plants”: the pride of students is palpable when they present their work at the end of semester in front of the other groups. Who would have thought that recreating a nineteenth-century allotment garden or a medieval herb garden could not only teach environmental history to students, but also create such sense of belonging? If not in the paper of the students, which have to remain academic, the way former students and present colleagues speak of Hofstad is proof of it.

Short bio

Cécile Bruyet is currently PhD-student at the Centre for Urban History on the project Food From Somewhere. She supervised the 2024 & 2026 Hofstad editions with Tim Soens. Hofstad will be open for public visit on May 30^th and 31^st as part of the “Open tuinen: De parels van Clusius” event taking places in gardens around the city of Antwerp. See: Bezoek Hofstad | Letteren en Wijsbegeerte | Universiteit Antwerpen, and .