Ruben Dario
Ian Hamilton, The garden of Little Sparta (Scotland, 1975). José Ramón
In Western thought, the garden originally carried a sense of Edenic nostalgia. Over time, however, the concept expanded, and viewpoints about nature broadened across science, poetry, and literature: Nature envelops and surrounds the world. The aim became to craft gardens that feel livable in many ways, places where boundaries soften and open up. This idea appears in Marta Llorente’s exploration of Between Nature and Architecture, where gardens are real or imagined spaces where poetry and literature share the stage with landscape.
This text does not trace a history of gardens but follows the notion of the “road to the garden,” a path that gains meaning as a feature of built space. It suggests that garden making is not only about technique or architecture; imagination also invents its corners, its whispers, its colors, and breathes life into the beings that inhabit them. Throughout novels, stories, poems, and chronicles, gardens of the past are remembered, often preserved in memory and given new life through literature. Llorente, an architect and educator, views the garden as an idea, a way of thinking, an image that occupies space between nature and culture, a soulful zone where passions mingle.
In the urban setting, the garden earns a distinct order that sets it apart from the broader built environment. This distinction is both spatial and semantic. The garden is described as a heterotopia, a term used by Foucault to mark places in the city where life unfolds differently from the rest. The border of the garden, the wall that confines it, reads from the outside as the guardian of an inaccessible treasure, preserving the symbolic autonomy of gardens that are open yet protected.
The journey through historical gardens reveals many that once belonged to royalty and power, later opened to the public. From Madrid’s Retiro to Barcelona’s Citadel Park, from Rome’s Villa Medici to New York City’s Central Park, visits are threaded with literary echoes. Works such as Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of Finzi-Contini, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Holden Caulfield’s wanderings in The Catcher in the Rye accompany the landscapes. Classic and modern writers alike, including Vázquez Montalbán and Gil de Biedma, contribute to a tapestry of sights in Barcelona, while Akira Kurosawa’s Live Broadcast evokes a worker’s struggle to secure a public park for citizens.
Gardens brought changes to technique and instrument, becoming prime spaces for large-scale experimentation. The opening pages on garden techniques highlight two elements that define garden identity: stone and water. Yet the text also treasures references to the arts, architecture, and hydraulic engineering found in gardens, tracing time from ancient Egypt and the Renaissance to Bomarzo’s enigmatic grounds. It travels through the Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens, and Paxton, noting how water games offered pleasure and contemplation for royalty and court, contributing to hydraulic development and some of the most advanced systems in Versailles during the 17th century.
The Alhambra in Granada holds a place of special resonance, where architecture, space, garden, and words mingle. Phrases decorate rooms such as the Two Sisters chamber, with verses from Ibn Zamrak translated by Emilio García Gómez. In the courtyards of the Lions and Myrtles, water’s music transforms spaces, shaping the atmosphere for inhabitants who lived with the sound of flowing water as an essential element of palace life.
The closing portion of the piece looks at the garden’s image in literature and art from the late 19th century to today. Baudelaire is cited in noting that nature around the poet begins to fade as he describes the overwhelming city. The final reflections speak of a garden’s murmured, abandoned notes and memory’s echoes, where nature spreads freely and the envisioned future garden emerges when a freer nature is welcomed into the scene.