Thomas Church was born in Boston, and raised in California, in Ojai and Oakland.[3]
He received his B.A. degree in Landscape Architecture from the College of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1922.[1] [5] He then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received his Master’s degree in City Planning and Landscape Architecture in 1926.[1][3]
After graduating Church spent six months at the American Academy in Rome on a Harvard awarded Sheldon Traveling Scholarship.[1] He also traveled throughout Europe, and became friends with Catherine Bauer while in France, with whom he would later teach at Berkeley.[6] He studied Italian Renaissance gardens, and Moorish and Iberian Renaissance Spanish gardens, observing their responses to a climate so similar the Mediterranean climate in California. On returning from Europe he worked in a city planning office on the East Coast (1927-1928), then he taught at Ohio State University (1928-1930).[1][3]