The Garden Wall: Boundary, Barrier or Invitation?

It might be called a wall, a fence, a hedge or even a ‘Ha-Ha’, its purpose remains the same; a garden barrier, a set boundary, a threshold between the tended natural space and something different. Occasionally these barriers instead functioned as invitations to watch, to visit and to envy that natural space that is contained within. The early modern period would see European gardens completely cast off the old medieval idea of the small closed-off walled gardens of the hortus conclusus to instead open up for large visible prestige gardens and parks. With these new parks came new requirements for setting and making boundaries with different forms of permeability regarding both the physical and the visual. The late renaissance gardens in many ways retained the old non-permeable high walls, the French formal gardens instead played around with hedges and splendid but visually permeable fences, while the later British landscape gardens had both physically and visually permeable barriers in the form of wooden fences, half-walls and the visually elusive ‘Ha-Ha’. Whatever the form the garden boundary took, it said something about the intention of the park and its creator, especially relating to their views on what privacy is, and what part of that privacy that should be publicly visible. This paper aims to study these changing views on the permeability of gardens by looking at the garden wall, and by extension all other forms of garden boundaries, from the 16th century until the early 19th century.