Garden of Eden (Venice)

The Garden of Eden, also known as the Eden Garden (Italian: Giardino Eden) is a villa with a famous garden, on the island of Giudecca in Venice, Italy. It is named after an Englishman, Frederic Eden, who designed the garden in 1884 and owned the property for a long time. From 1927 it was owned by Princess Aspasia Manos and her daughter Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia. Between 1979 and 2000, it was owned by the Austrian painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who abandoned the garden to nature.

In 1884, Frederic Eden, a great-uncle of the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and his wife Caroline, sister of the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, bought an area of six acres on the Venetian island of Giudecca. It contained a former outbuilding of the convent of the Sisters of Santa Croce. The property was later expanded by two acres when the Venetian authorities enlarged the island. The couple created Venice's largest private garden, an English landscape garden symbolic of the British presence in Venice, containing statues, roses and animals. It was frequented by many figures from the world of the arts, including Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter Sickert, Henry James, Eleonora Duse and Baron Corvo.

The garden featured a large number of willow pergolas covered in roses, and extensive plantings of Madonna lily as well as other English flowers. Paths around the garden were surfaced with local seashells. There were lawns, courts and a walk lined with cypresses. In 1903 Eden published "A Garden in Venice", a short book describing his creation of the garden.

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