The invention of the Western garden bears ancient and distant roots. From the Near East, anthropological and cultural melting pot of different societies, come myths, models and terminology, until the complex semantic value acquired by the Greek term paradeisos, including the idea of wonder and magnificence, to the Hebrew gan’eden, its translation in the history of salvation. The garden in the western world is always somehow a paradise on earth and its steady invention is the history of the symbolic and practical research of the reconstruction of this original idea, of this myth. From the botanical world, its wisdom, its material culture, from every vegetarian domestication (cultivated fields, woods, forests) human being takes and identifies tools for creating and limit, almost sacrally, his own gardens, until the time when William Kent, in 18th century, will jump the barrier of his own enclosures, so that the whole landscape will become a garden. In Europe and the Western world the idea of garden is part of the global history of its inhabitants. European man continuously changes his garden, from geometrical to formal or artificially naturalistic; he will exclude and include flowers form the setting as main characters of the vegetal landscape, inventing an infinite sequel of landscapes. This work visually and textually documents the creating along two millennia of the Western garden. A few examples. The Renaissance Italian garden: its archetype can well be considered the Garden of Belvedere in the Vatican by Donato Bramante which spreads alltroughout Italy, in Rome (Villa Albani, Villa Medici, Quirinale, Palazzo Corsini, etc.), in the province of Rome, to other Italian towns and regions (Florence and surrounding area, Tuscany, Milan, Lombardia, Veneto), and then beyond the Alps to France, Germany (Heidelberg, Mainz), especially in Bavaria (Wüerzburg, München), Austria (Hellbrun close to Salzburg and the complex development of the Viennese gardens), Bohemia, then the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal. The predominance of the Italian garden is kept until the age of Louis XIVth when around Versailles and in Paris the gardens of the Ancien Regime are formed as places of symbolical and practical exercise of royal power: Le Tuileries, Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles in its three main forms including the Small and the Great Trianon. This style spreads out in many German and Dutch towns so far as Berlin, Erfurt, Weimar, Dresden, Leipzig. In the 18th century the modelling of the English landscape garden ultimately opens up the garden to the world, thanks also to Chinese influences, with Lancelot Brown, William Kent and their followers: Beachborough in Kent, Kew Gardens then Kensington Gardens, Hampton Court, Badminton House in Gloucestershire, Chiswick, Stowe, then Ashridge Park in the Hertfordshire; finally in the 19th century Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Twickenham on the Thames and Wobury-farm in Surrey until Bath on Avon. What this work underlines in the history of the invention of the Western garden is the “breaking of the enclosure”, is the going beyond the wall and the fusion of the garden with the landscape. From this idea comes the tight relationship between role and drawing of the gardens and the evolution of the painting of the landscape (Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa), no more a background to the scene, but a show offered as a primary object. That multifaceted event we call Romanticism can quite properly be defined an idea: that the world is an englischer Garten on a large scale. The garden, and later the park, have in common the tendency towards a creation of a complex and defined pictorial scene offered to the wide public. They have both winding paths, across which people can discover various natural scenes, enriched with showy constructions and seductive rocailles, a sort of nature made anew and inserted into the urban landscape. On the contrary the contemporary garden scenery, between the late 20th and early 21st century, is very experimental, even in an interdisciplinary way (garden drawing, art, design and architecture, urban landscape and city planning). Thriving and very stimulating, it identifies with the garden and parks' world the top level of the global project innovation, the always renewing field where creative hints and landscape awareness are turned into a physical form, often at the edges of the urban world. Among these different fragments of landscape there is no shape resemblance. Just a point in common: they are all territories where diversity finds refuge. In this way abandoned railway viaducts become new urban hanging gardens (Dusmenil's viaduct in Paris, for instance), but also left behind infrastructures easily change into green spaces of the city, as in the case of the High Line in New York. The widening of the concept of garden to the one of landscape is now internationally acknowledged by the culture of urban planning.