Creating an Eden

Whether it’s hiking in New Mexico or touring the gardens at the Alhambra, my father always seems to lead our family back to nature. Our family vacations always seek to “escape the city;” we rarely venture to large, metropolitan areas. Even at home, my parents love gardening and tending to the pond, even simply sitting on the porch looking at our yard.

The Generalife (Gardens at the Alhambra)

The Generalife, Gardens at the Alhambra

The reason why my family enjoys spending so much time in nature is that it is a means of “escape” as well as a way to turn back to our roots, to a simpler time, where we can ignore our computers, televisions, and busy schedules. When I’m hiking with my family, I feel a sense of peace with the natural world—a place that needs no improvement. I remember one instant, in Colorado, where my dad found a pond he did not want to leave. Finally, he took some pictures, and told me he wanted to someday have a house with a similar, perfect pond. Recently, we moved to a house with a pond on the property. However, this pond is very different from the still, natural pond we saw on our hiking trip. Like the definition of a garden, this pond is an “enclosed piece” (723), a space taken for our own; it is not completely free or wild, but rather “cultivated….used” (723) by man rather than simply being. Arnold speaks of the natural world as a place “Man did not make, and cannot mar;” (739) perhaps the only true pieces of nature we can witness are the ones we do not touch. But as humans, we have the desire to experience this frontier—we want to get our hands dirty, to plant our own gardens, and to create our own Edens.

Klinkenborg speaks of landscape architecture, in particular Central Park, as a filter or “lens” (721) through which we can view the man-made world. Walking into a neat, orderly garden, “we suddenly glimpse what the world would look like if it were the work of a single hand, a single eye, a world created to please our emotions of place,” (Klinkenborg, 721). This is why such gardens are created—they are the way we, as humans, can relate to the natural world. Creating such spaces is our way of “creat[ing] perceptual order” (721, Klinkenborg). Even though we know these spaces are formed and created, they are no less real and continue to serve the same purpose: linking us back to the places we long to remember.

The pond at my home in Dallas