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* The history of landscape architecture itself can be traced back at least as far as the builders of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but as an academic discipline it is still fairly young.
* The beginnings of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools can be traced back to the beginnings of landscape education in Europe. The first European landscape architecture programme was established in Norway in 1919, to be followed by a course in Germany at Berlin in 1929.
* In countries with a number of landscape schools, such as Great Britain and Germany, national education groups have been in existence for some time. The British Landscape Education Group was set up in the early 1970s, while the German Hochschulkonferenz Landschaft dates from the later part of the decade;
* Within the Scandinavian countries there is a long history of Nordic co-operation, and staff from landscape schools in Denmark, Norway and Sweden have been holding regular international meetings for many years.
* The establishment of the ERASMUS Programme by the European Union provided a basis for the further development co-operation between landscape schools within the countries of the European Union. From the earliest days a number of landscape schools, including Edinburgh College of Art, Wageningen, Aarhus and the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen, were involved in bilateral exchanges of both staff and students. Subsequently two more formal networks were established: one focussing on a series of "intensive programme" organised by ELEE and network set up by Manchester University in 1991.
* The first pan-European meeting of landscape schools was convened by Berlin Technical University in 1989 under the title Europäische Hochschulkonferenz Landschaft. This was followed by a second meeting in Vienna in 1990.
* The European Conference of Landscape Architecture Schools was formed as a result of the success of the Berlin and Vienna meetings and met first in Wageningen in the Netherlands in 1991. This meeting was followed by a series of further annual conferences.
* At the 2000 Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, a decision was taken to expand the activities of ECLAS beyond the annual conferences and to symbolise this by changing the name of the organisation to the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools.
