Garden real estate
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Garden real estate is a niche in the real estate property market. It includes historic gardens, town gardens, country estates and roof gardens. Combining the attractions of town and country has has attracted people since ancient times and the idea was illustrated with the famous Three Magnets Diagram which led to the Garden city movement.
For much of their evolutionary period humans were Hunter-gatherers with a nomadic lifestyle. Civilization began when our ancestors began to live in towns. But as Carl Jung argued, our collective unconscious seems to have retained a memory of previous conditions of existence, including a love of the natural world. The earliest civilizations, in Mesopotamia built fortified towns on tells. They were raised above the flood plain of the Tigris and Euphrates and surrounded by irrigated gardens on the lower land.
Living in fortified towns remained popular for most towns in most parts of the world. The exceptions were in civilizations with a strong central authority, like the Roman Empire which made it sufficiently safe to live in what became known as villas. They were located outside fortified towns. The garden letters of Pliny the Younger provide the oldest literary account of the life which could be enjoyed in what the modern world would call 'garden real estate'.
The invention of cannon in Medieval Europe reduced the attraction of living in fortified cities. The walls no longer gave protection and the crowded conditions were unpleasant. Renaissance authors, like Alberti remembered how the Romans had enjoyed villa life and great families, like the Medici, began to build country villas with large gardens outside Florence and other walled towns. The popularity of garden estates has grown steadily since that time and suburbs with this type of property are growing rapidly outside historic cities. For prospective garden-owners, the problem is that few suburbs are planned to have good gardens. Some famous exceptions are Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Riverside, Illinois designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The landscape architecture profession has developed around the idea of integrating urban design with natural processes. In his famous book, Ian McHarg called the idea Design with Nature.
Purchase of second homes provides another solution to the problem of how to combine the delights of the town with the delights of the country. The Scandinavians look for summer houses and beach houses.
The British yearn for country cottages as weekend retreats. The Americans look for vacation homes, often in the overseas property market.
