Historic gardens are important parts of humanity’s built heritage within the designed landscape, providing many environmental, economic and socio-cultural benefits. Management is a key part of their conservation, perhaps the most difficult because it is costly, must be continual, and requires a skilled workforce. This systematic review looks at the literature addressing historic garden management, with special attention regarding the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability. Academic studies on this subject come from many different disciplines, making it both stimulating and fragmented. It is now time to consolidate these interdisciplinary efforts into a clear vision, including a framework of key themes and research methods so as to better coordinate efforts and make the information and innovation generated more accessible to the garden managers “in the trenches”. With this aim, reviewed studies are classified according to 10 criteria: supply or demand orientation; management phase involved; primary sustainability processes addressed; geographic criteria; number of sites covered; policy documents referred to; kind of data collected; study methods employed; possibility of bias specifically regarding historic gardens; garden use. An analysis of these criteria shows that historic garden management literature focuses on describing the gardens themselves, with few studies interested in the people supporting them. Future research should follow recent policy documents’ lead and pay more attention to community value and involvement.

This study attempts to measure the capacity of the EU geographical certification scheme to positively influence the price of certified products and the incomes of their producers. A comparison of the economic results of two cheese-producing dairy farm enterprises with different business strategies and locations within the Sicilian hinterlands is performed in order to determine the transformation value of each dairy’s sheep milk into pecorino cheese (with and without the Protected Designation of Origin, or PDO, certification) and the related joint products (ricotta). The economic convenience of the total transformation of sheep milk into Pecorino Siciliano PDO and ricotta is also appraised. The results suggest that producing and commercializing Pecorino Siciliano PDO is a promising strategy for differentiating and promoting dairy farm products and improving the financial performance of producers, with foreseeable positive repercussions in the socioeconomically less favored rural areas where they are located.

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