Escape to Eden: 7 Strangest Gardens

Frederick Law Olmsted is legendary for his attention to detail and his insistence on the unity of forms in all the parks he designed late in the 19th century. He’s most well known for his work on New York City’s Central Park, and of the Midway Plaisance for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. He left a timeless legacy, and his work remains an inspiration to any serious landscape architect. Here are a number of unique gardens that would have no doubt inspired either awe or scorn from Olmsted had he lived to see them.

Las Pozas

Las Pozas is a blending of strange architecture in a Mexican rainforest environment. Designed by Edward James, this spectacle of surrealism has walkways stamped with footprints, orchid-shaped sculptures and structures that loom high above the landscape, which is spread throughout 40 acres. As the years pass, the site is being rapidly consumed by the natural landscape it’s built on. As such, Las Pozas has since been named an endangered cultural site by the World Monument Foundation.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Named the Garden of Cosmic Speculation by its architect and landscape designer Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick, the Garden is open to the public only once a year and is located at Jencks’ private estate in Scotland. The garden’s entire motif is based on geometric and natural shapes, with spiraling landforms, double-helix staircases and landscapes that both engage and inspire strange, transcendent thoughts.

Step Garden at Acros Fukuoka

In the densely populated city of Fukuoka, landscape architects had to make do with their ingenuity to design a 5400-square-meter garden in one of the city’s last green spaces. They did so cleverly by extending the park’s length onto a 14-story ziggurat-like civic center next to it. The Step Garden is now home to 50,000 plants across 120 varieties. Two entrances to the park allow visitors to walk the length of the entire park and ascend its steps.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan

England’s Heligan estate is home to the Lost Gardens, which houses the Mud Maid and the Giant’s Head of Heligan, which resemble a pair of colossal-sized Chia Pets. The figures may be regarded as being somewhat kitsch, but many of its visitors find them impressive.

Poison Garden

The aptly named Poison Garden belongs to Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities. Far from being an unwelcome place, the little garden serves as a cosy little sanctuary for the author and contains over 35 different species of deadly plants, including nightshade, white snakeroot, hemlock (the plant that Socrates used to commit suicide), datura, and more. The garden is locked up tight to prevent anyone from wandering in, and cement tombstones provide an apt warning to visitors.

Jardin Exotique

Located in Monaco, Le Jardin Exotique, french for Exotic Garden, is sanctuary to a wide array of cacti imported from all over the world–from Africa and Mexico to the Arabian Peninsula. As the park’s assortment of cacti are embedded within the rocky coastal cliffs, visitors can walk onto stairways carved into the terrain in order to see them, providing them with a beautiful view of the coastline below and the ocean beyond.

Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden

Located in Tromso, Norway, the Arctic-Alpine garden is the only garden in the world located that far north. With cold weather and long, dark winters, maintenance of the park was a challenge for both the plants and the park’s designers. The botanical garden is home to species of plants from all over the world, proving that life can sustain itself even in the harshest conditions.