With the new engineering continuously being developed and constructed, landscape architecture educators have widely concerned cultivating the comprehensive thinking modes of engineering talents. They have also focused on the key problem of exploring the teaching method that deeply integrates the professional learning and critical thinking. This paper takes the teaching of western garden history as the medium, breaks through the traditional passive teaching mode of mainly relying on teaching materials, and applies visual teaching methods, in order to guide students to complete the problem-oriented curriculum tasks, and execute mental exercises and critical thinking. Firstly, the paper discussed the connotation of mental exercises and under its influence, the teaching reform goals of western garden history. Secondly, it organized the multiple perspectives on western garden history learning. Then, it illustrated the role of "vision" as the starting point in the staged task framework. Finally, it employed the Italian terrace garden Villa Lante as a case, to explain the specific application and presentation of the visual oriented teaching task in the stages of problem discovery, background research, detailed demonstration and comprehensive conclusion. This paper has comprehensively evaluated and analyzed the methods and characteristics of learning the western garden history under the guidance of "vision" and "problem".