Reading Response: Green Dreams; Gardens "Eccentric Spaces" by: Robert Harbison

Ha-has (Recessed walls)

This landscape design element can be found near the area surrounding the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
The Ha-has wall creates a vertical boundary impediment while sustaining a continuous and unbroken (without obstructing) view of the landscape from afar. The design incorporates a incline which slopes downward to a vertical wall (masonry retaining wall).




Washington Monument



Parco de Mostri

Bomarzo, in the province of Viterbo, northern Lazio, Italy

16th Century

 L'Orco Classico

Roman Forum

The Roman Forum was designed by the architect Vitruvius

Rome, Italy









Boboli Garden

Architects: Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Buontalenti, Niccolò Tribolo, Bartolomeo Ammannati

Florence, Italy

Ragnaie (spiders lane)

Jardin du Luxembourg

Inspired by the Boboli Gardens in Florence, were created upon the initiative of Queen Marie de Medici in 1612.

Paris, France













Tivoli Garden

Terraced gardens designed in 1550 by architect Pirro Ligorio for the governor Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este

Tivoli, Lazio, Italy













Bernini's Four Rivers

designed in 1651 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Innocent X

Piazza Navona in Rome, Italy

Jean Dubuffet's Jardin d'Emaille

Epoxy resin and concrete with polyurethane paints
Made in 1974
Collection: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo (Netherlands)

Stowe Garden

The landscape garden at Stowe is one of the most remarkable legacies of Georgian England. Created by Viscount Cobham in the grounds of his family home from 1717, it reflected a programme of ideas based on Cobham’s hugely influential network of political affiliations.

Buckinghamshire, England

Stourhead Garden

When Stourhead first opened in the 1740s, a magazine described it as ‘a living work of art’. The world-famous landscape garden has at its centrepiece a magnificent lake reflecting classical temples, mystical grottoes, and rare and exotic trees, and offers a day of fresh air and discovery.

Stourhead is a 1,072-acre estate at the source of the River Stour near Mere, Wiltshire, England. The estate includes a Palladian mansion, the village of Stourton, gardens, farmland, and woodland. Stourhead is part owned by the National Trust since 1946.

Wiltshire, England

Vizcaya Museum

Vizcaya was created as James Deering’s subtropical winter home in the 1910s and today it is a National Historic Landmark and accredited museum.

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is a National Historic Landmark that preserves the Miami estate of agricultural industrialist James Deering to engage our community and its visitors in learning through the arts, history and the environment. James Deering chose the location of Vizcaya because he was attracted to the warm weather and hoped it would improve his health.

Paul Chalfin was not a trained architect and, in 1912, Deering hired Francis Burrall Hoffman, Jr. (1882–1980) as Vizcaya’s architect of record. Hoffman developed the plan of the Main House, creating a spatial framework for the decorative elements and artwork that Chalfin and Deering had already collected.

Fairchild Tropical Garden

Fairchild Tropical Gardens gets its name from one of the most famous plant explorers in history, David Fairchild (1869-1954). Dr. Fairchild was known for traveling the world in search of useful plants, but he was also an educator and a renowned scientist.

The botanical garden is located in Miami because it is the one place in the continental United States, where tropical plants could grow outdoors year-round. Opened to the public in 1938, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden was established on an 83-acre site south of Miami. 

Miami, Florida

When the author says every garden is a replica he means that a garden is a representation or an attempt to recapture an image. The garden is a replica of the natural environment as another image of art.   

The two poles of gardening are formal gardens and irregular English gardens. The two poles of gardening relate to the gardens of Versailles because the garden depicts two different styles of gardening occurring at the same time creating a juxtaposition within the realm of gardening to demonstrate the approaching Revolution in France. The elephantine stasis or massive and immense state of inactivity shares the grounds with the butterfly charm of the Marie Antionette’s hameau’s natural English garden landscape, a reflection of France's cultural values on the evening before the Revolution.

A feature to describe the Versailles garden is still geometrical without edges, without the figure’s being closed at the far end, the lines ruled but stretching off to infinity. This type of garden starts narrow and go one to become suggestively wide. Despite the freedom at the other end, it is the most rigidly organized of all, imitating a reasoned progression from small to large. 

In contrast, the other kind of boundless garden is not a geometrical figure at all. The English kind of garden has no obvious beginning or end and the bounds are confused on all sides, so that for this garden an un-wall had to be invented. The sunken fence is an English joke on law and order that exercises real constraint with the imaginable English deviousness.    

I find that the communities of home property developments and apartment complexes near the city of Doral, in Miami Florida are very picturesque because they are very pretty, attractive, pictorial qualities which refer to the modernization of landscape and architecture of the constructed homes. They all generally have the same layout inside, inside/outside color, and materials used to construct the home which takes away the originality leading to the home later becoming boring and unpleasing to the eye to look at. 

A familiar place to me with a landscape within it is Coral Reef Park. The park is located by the Coral Reef suburban home community. My relationship towards this park, this is the park where to go to exercise with my best friend Amarys and her sisters under the gazebo. This park represents friendship, peacefulness, health, beauty within nature, community, respect for nature, family and love.