The project explores the garden as one of the West’s oldest and most persistent metaphysical structures—a crafted space where humanity negotiates its relation to nature, desire, memory, and human finality. Beginning with the sacred groves of Greece and Rome, the project reconstructs the garden as a site where gods were believed to dwell and where human presence acquired ritual significance. Ancient gardens were not aesthetic diversions but ontological thresholds: points of contact between mortal life and the numinous world. With the Christianization of Europe, this sacred ontology collapsed.

Against this historical horizon, the modern garden continues to bear the spectral weight of its sacred past. Statues, ruins, ornamental grottos, ponds, birds, and flowers become fragments of an older symbolic order—ghosts embedded in designed landscapes. By reading gardens through phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and hauntology, the project reveals them as spaces where desire returns in ritual form, where the Imaginary masks the void of the Real, and where post-sacred humanity encounters nature as both consolation and enigma. The Metaphysical Garden thus proposes a new theory of landscape: gardens are not merely cultural artifacts but metaphysical stages where memory, loss, and the archaeology of desire unfold beneath the surface of contemporary beauty.