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Garden Transmissions: Word / Image / Experience / Future CONFERENCE examines the ways that the export and importation of garden elements, their designs and styles, technology and maintenance, have created a continuum of knowledge transfer set at the intersection of nature and cultural expression. Enfolding these "transmissions", gardens have both invented new types and invigorated former models. Soon after its "discovery", the New World began to export ideas and plants that entered Europe as influential novelties. Europe itself efficiently exported its own garden traditions, subsequently modified after adaptation to landscapes with new environmental conditions. Garden transmissions such as these have contributed to the making of a world garden culture by providing the tools for achieving the fruitful cross-pollination and garden-making knowledge to mediate between nature and humans with repercussions in Sciences and Arts.

Transmissions were effected through the exchange of writings, images, and the direct contact with foreign cultures. Books, letters, and visual representations brought ideas to those who stayed at home, while visits to the great gardens of the world effected further transmissions. Over time groups of scholars, amateurs, and builders traveled to the sources of new ideas and fashions, to cities like Florence in the Cinquecento, to India in the seventeenth century, or to England and its gardens in the following century. The experience of the Grand Tour directed the European elite toward gardens to provide comfort, beauty, expertise in designing landscapes but also a strong relation with Nature.