European Landscape Architecture: Best Practice in Detailing

The Garden of Somogy

‘unknown’, inner world, and reveal how the future
users of the garden might feel once the design has
been implemented.

According to SzĦcs, our ideas about gardens are
rooted in the Garden of Eden, an ideal notion of
the garden, which represents the memory of a
harmonic environment, existing within ourselves
as a deep, inner, personal, generally subconscious
experience. The task of a landscape architect is to
revive this idea, to keep it working, and to use it in
planning and design. He states:

I think that the landscape architect, when

starting to plan a new garden, has to have this

notion somewhere hidden deep inside, and

during the design process he tries to revive,

to validate and to re-construct it. Therefore,

the creation of a garden should be first called

a rebirth, the rebirth of the Garden of Eden.

Before getting started, I observed and felt

the landscape of Somogy in Bonnya, so as

to create a garden concerned with and con-

nected to the atmosphere of the landscape. I

tried to include the landscape of Somogy into

the garden itself. The landscape is really vivid

here with its small hills, fine vineyards, creeks

and mosaic views. There is a special quality in

its atmosphere, in its situation and in the view

of the village from the estate. These natural

facilities are realised in the garden itself, in

the small terraces, in the arches and lines of

the retaining walls, in the patterns of tiling,

resulting in harmony with the landscape.

The same ideas are expressed in the building mat-

erials and of course in the use of plants, starting

from the flower gardens next to the buildings,

through the fruit gardens to the semi-natural planta-

tion in the outer part of the estate, which forms a

natural buffer. And as we observe nature and the

landscape with a special sensitivity, we should

also observe the person for whom we design the

garden. The designer’s intentions have to be bal-

anced and harmonised with those of the client,

who should adopt these ideas so as to be able to

develop and take care of the garden in the future.