The World's Best Fictional Gardens
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Throughout the history of many cultures, gardens have featured in art and literature as the ultimate symbol of beauty, vitality and fertility - in fact, as an omnipotent metaphor for life itself with all its seasons. What’s more, the outdoors remain a vital symbol in the Australian identity. In many of the traditional indigenous cultures of this country, the landscape is like a history book, vital to storytelling, seasonal cooking and medicine. From the rich descriptions authored by Joseph Banks, botanist to Captain Cook on his voyages to the Pacific, to the modern stereotypes of the Australian backyard and the hazardous unkempt outback marketed to international tourists, Australia is a place warmly connected to outdoor beauty.
Gardens continue to fascinate and inspire literature to this day - and there’s nothing more fruitful than a bit of visual inspiration when it comes to planning your new landscaping project. Here are a few of the world’s most iconic fictional gardens and ideas about how you can incorporate their elements right into your own backyard.
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The Garden of Live Flowers - Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
The sequel to Lewis Carroll’s famous work Alice in Wonderland sees Alice exploring a dreamlike maze garden inside the depths of a mirror. Carroll's rich descriptions of a valley laid out like a chessboard with argumentative flowers have captured children’s imaginations for generations. Through film adaptations, the Garden of Live Flowers has morphed with the intricate Victorian tea parties of book one to form an image in the popular imagination of kooky French-style gardens, such as the Versailles Palaces or Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam.
You can invoke a little Alice style in your own garden by planting flowering plants in neat, symmetrical patterns and practising regular soil maintenance - after all, hard, manicured soils are the key to keeping flowers happy and lively: “in most gardens, they make the beds too soft - so that the flowers are always asleep” says Tigerlily to Alice. You could also look into curvy Victorian-style garden furniture and colourful outdoor decking.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon - Various writings (Stabo, Diodorus, Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus)
It is a much-debated mystery whether the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ever even existed. Famous for being one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the most popular legend tells that they were constructed by King Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled 605 - 562 BC) for his wife Amytis to comfort her homesickness for the forests of the Median Empire. Built to resemble a mountainous landscape with many levels and pillars, the gardens featured aqueducts running to the highest towers and were perceived to be hanging from the sky.
Although the name likely refers to their extraordinary height (and is even thought to be a mistranslation of ‘overhanging’ in the sense of balcony terraces), you can capture a bit of that exotic atmosphere for yourself with hanging basket plants or by constructing rock features and cobbled pathways. Another lesson to be taken from the Hanging Gardens is that planting foreign species, whilst not entirely authentic, can add real warmth and character to a home.
The Shire - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy & The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Homeland to the Hobbits of Middle-earth, The Shire is a sweeping and idyllic valley of forests, fruit farms and gorgeous pokey houses which are shaped by the natural contours of the earth. Often said to be inspired by the so-called “Merry England” ideology, which glorified English pastoral life as some kind of medieval utopia of thatched cottages and hearty meadows, this landscape provides ultimate proof that sometimes simplicity can be just as effective as elaborate design.
If planting oak woodlands in your backyard seems a tad excessive, try incorporating natural wood into your fences, pathways and clotheslines to get a touch of that traditional (and mythical!) countryside magic. You can even purchase children’s cubbyhouses and dog kennels inspired by ‘Bag End’, the famous Hobbit Hole and home of Bilbo Baggins.
The Daguanyuan - Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin)
Commonly known in English as the Prospect Garden or Grand View Garden, the Daguanyuan holds tremendous thematic importance in the Dream of the Red Chamber which was written as a memorial to the influential women in Xueqin’s life.The novel centres around protagonist Jia Baoyu who feels a strong affiliation with his sisters and female companions, and spends a lot of time inside the peaceful, manicured garden of his home at Rongguo Mansion. Baoyu finds himself drawn to traditionally female pursuits like reading and writing poetry, frustrating his father by displaying little interest in studying the Confucian classics. Full of bamboo lodges and courtyards perfect for elegant strolls, the garden is the epicentre of femininity - beautiful, restrained, peaceful - precisely positioned between natural and wild.
The story is so popular it even inspired a life-size replica of the garden to be built in Beijing in 1984. You could try installing some outdoor fairylights (which feature prominently in the story during celebrations) or investing in a water feature or running creek, symbolic of the natural flow of life. Japanese zen gardens were initially modelled on Chinese design so you could also look at creative rock gardens or miniature pagodas, perfect for relaxing outside on a sunny day.
Herbology Wing - Harry Potter Series (J. K. Rowling)
The Herbology Wing of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry features greenhouses dedicated to the study of magical flora. According to author J.K. Rowling, the elaborate roofs of the seven greenhouses are lined with beautiful stone dragons which overlook the extensive collection of botanic equipment, strange fungi, screeching potted mandrakes, fanged geraniums and various other unusual vegetation! This is not a garden where you can wander unawares - earmuffs and dragon-hide gloves are musts for handling any unexpected attacks within this sauna of lofty dragon dung fumes!
While you may find getting your hands on a Venomous Tentacula rather difficult, there are lots of exotic and interesting plants to add a bit of colour to your garden, atrium or greenhouse. Carnivorous plants are crowd-pleasers with the children - think Venus Flytraps and Cobra lilies - but if you’d prefer something which requires less maintenance, have a look at indoor cacti and bonsai species.
The Ranch - Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)
When it comes to gardens, you don’t get much stranger than the dry, dusty and disorganised setting of Like Water For Chocolate. The story focuses on Tita, a young woman stuck on a Mexican ranch by an oppressive family tradition which requires her to take care of her mother until she dies. Her only escape from a tedious and painful life separated from her beloved Pedro is in her cooking, which, through Esquivel’s use of magic realism, begins to reflect her emotional life, with each recipe having catastrophic consequences on those around her. Tita’s backyard is a chaotic mix of herbs, cacti, dry grasses, outdoor showers and sheds - not so much a garden as an eclectic collection of ingredients waiting to be laced together with an episode of emotional family drama.
Embrace your inner Tita and focus on cooking as the heart of the home with windowsill herb gardens, chicken coops and vegetable patches. Roses also feature prominently as a symbol of Tita’s repressed desire - and add a classic and unassumingly pretty touch to an Australian backyard.
The Secret Garden - The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
A classic of English literature, The Secret Garden at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire was fascinating to 10-year-old Mary Lennox. Hearing stories of the private rose garden cultivated by her dead aunt rouses a curiosity in her which gentles her rough disposition - and with the discovery of a secret key, Mary uncovers a garden with so much beauty and life that it nurtures people back to health and renews a family thought to have been destroyed.
Traditional English manor and cottage gardens feature many different flowering plants, separated into bricked enclaves. Roses are the most important feature - but since the book is about adventure and agency being rewarded, maybe you can try mixing a range of larger native Australian species like Banksia and Golden Wattle as a backdrop and smaller traditional flowers like lavender and daisies in the foreground. It’s all about choosing colours which complement each other and creating levels and patterns which catch the eye.
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Landscaping Quotes
from local landscapers
