The Ha-Ha

Chapter 19 of The Ecology of Eden is called "Leaping the Fence" and is aptly named as this chapter dives into landscape gardens.  The best part of this chapter though is found in the section called "Enclosure and the Ha-Ha".  In England as as man-made gardens were spreading like wildfire there was a necessity for the new scientific agriculture to be brought in.  The problem with this was that it meant that fencing or hedges had to be built in order to quarter off these new species of plants being introduced into the gardens.  This hindered the open-field system that many were accustomed to and preferred.  Eisenberg quotes the Pope who stated that the point of a garden was to "call in the country" (pg. 224).  With walls in place this contradicted the reasoning behind having a garden.

This led to the creation of a very clever solution.  The invisible wall, or ha-ha was implemented as the fix to this problem.  The ha-ha is a stone embankment sunk in a ditch.  It is called a ha-ha because when looking across the garden it blends right it but if you were to walk over a ha-ha you would fall as it is sunken in order to break up the different landscapes and plants in the garden.  This allowed for the fence that was necessary to seem like it was a part of nature since it was able to blend in.  The use of the ha-ha was something that I enjoyed because it left the field open rather than creating an enclosed space, which happens later.  When thinking about nature and gardens being closed off from the world does not provide the feeling of being immersed in nature, instead it creates a sense of claustrophobia when the point, in my opinion, should be a sense of freedom and joy.

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