Garden

Nebuchadnezzar (r. 605–562 B.C.E.), the Chaldean king of Babylon, introduced another persistent idea of the garden, that of the garden as a lost home. Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, to comfort one of his wives, who missed "the meadows of her mountains, the green and hilly landscape of her youth" (Thacker, p. 16). A similar motivation prompted the creation of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. The Qing emperor Kang Xi (1662–1723) built the Pi-shu shan-chuang at Rehe (Jehol) in China to emulate the Manchurian homelands. In the modern era, retirees in the deserts of the American Southwest, self-exiled from temperate climates, recreate the comforting lawns, maples, and flowers reminiscent of their previous homes. Homer used Odysseus's memories of his childhood in his garden with his father, who gave him fruit trees and taught him the names of the plants, to underscore the hero's longing for home.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were described by Diodorus Siculus:

Since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier … [it] resembled a theater … the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park … the roofs of the galleries were covered with beams of stone … sufficient for the roots of the largest trees; and the ground, when levelled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that … could give pleasure to the beholder … The galleries contained many royal lodgings; and there was one gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the garden with water. (Thacker, p. 17)

Admired by the ancient Greeks and Romans, they demonstrate several characteristics of gardens persisting to the early twenty-first century: the use of engineering and technology—often, paradoxically, to achieve a natural effect—and the attempt to make the garden a place of pleasure and sensuous delight; the integration of agriculture in the garden; and the integration of theater, poetry, and painting.

In terms of world history (not just garden design), the most far-reaching, if poignant, image of the garden as lost home is Italy: Ancient Rome. Courtyard garden in Pompeii, with paintings of birds and flowers on the interior walls of the colonnade. MARA MILLER found in the story of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis.