Garden History - Early Gardens

I have been delving a little deeper into garden history, focusing on early gardens. I’m using Christopher Thacker’s The History of Gardens as my guide, and reading sections from Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’ Landscape Design - A Cultural and Architectural History. Both agree that the first gardens were discovered and not made. A natural spot, such as a clearing in the forest or a lush valley in a barren mountainside, might attract the attention of humans. The garden spot is not tended, but grows naturally. Thacker reports that the oldest texts describe these spots as gardens of the gods, or those favored by the gods, where no toil is needed.

According to Rogers, almost all prehistoric cultures held that some places in nature are especially sacred. These sacred places, or natural gardens, provided a ritualistic setting for humans to attempt to understand their origins and control the natural environment. A marker, an altar, a temple, a cosmological structure, a complex were added to the natural garden over time, making myth, religion, philosophy, and science closely integrated with garden and landscape development.

Ablaze in late afternoon fall light, the hoodoos in Bryce National Park
have an almost mythical quality.

I, too, have encountered those natural gardens, although I’m too modern to call them sacred. Yet certain places do have a certain draw, or mystery, or beauty that causes me to take notice. Places like the rainforest behind my childhood home in Alaska; a grotto in Atlin, British Columbia; the sweeping tundra north of the Arctic Circle; a jungle waterfall on the Yucatan peninsula; the quaking aspens around Dawson City, Yukon Territory; the beaches off the Oregon Coast. They are more than just beautiful places, they are places that capture my imagination, inspire me, and cause me to contemplate God and the cosmos.