Garden - Death, Time And Temporality, Order And Plenty, The Lost Home, Garden As Paradise And Enclosure. - Gardens in the History of Ideas
agriculture aesthetics abstract
The term garden, which is of Germanic origin, means "yard" or "enclosure" and denotes ways of organizing earth, water, plants and, sometimes, people, animals, and art (sculpture, architecture, theater, music, and poetry), the formal qualitities of which are determined as much by pleasure, artistry, or aesthetics as by convenience or necessity. This definition excludes arrangements of sacred space based on religious customs and sports, exclusions that are consistent with most societies.
Not all cultures have gardens. For many reasons, anthropologists and garden historians consider most small cultivated plots to be forms of agriculture, as opposed to gardens. Gardens presuppose agriculture but in addition embrace a cultural and psychological distance from agriculture expressed in aesthetics.
Gardens in the History of Ideas
Gardens have the capability to give physical form to ideas either by being modeled on familiar ideas or by creating a new design that generates or evokes new ideas, or through a combination of the two. Gardens make abstract ideas concrete—visible, tangible, and kinesthetic. In so doing, gardens can communicate complex abstract ideas convincingly.
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Gardens express ideas of victory over death in three ways. First, since their living components could die at any time (as a result of neglect or the whim of the owner or overwhelming natural forces), their mere existence represents a triumph over ill-will, chaos, and death; gardens signal that the world can be made right, especially through the use of human knowledge, skill, and spirit. Second, be…
The people of ancient Egypt understood that by controlling the Nile River and the agriculture dependent upon it, they might impose order on the primordial chaos that was always a potential threat. Egyptian garden paintings, the world's earliest, show geometry and symmetry as the formal indications of this valuable foundation of such order. These early images show rectangular pools filled wi…
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were described by Diodorus Siculus: Since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier … [it] resembled a theater … the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park … the roofs of the galleries were covered with beams of stone &#…
a paradise among them [the Persians] seems to have been a large Space of Ground, adorned and beautified with all Sorts of Trees, both of Fruits and of Forest, either found there before it was inclosed [ sic ], or planted after; either cultivated like Gardens, for Shades and for Walks, with Fountains or Streams, and all Sorts of Plants usual in the Climate, and pleasant to the Eye, the Smell, or th…
The Roman pastoral ideal symbolized by the villa and its garden ideal was revived in Renaissance Italy and eighteenth-century England, whence it spread to America. It was based on models found in Vergil's Aeneid and Georgics, in the letters of Pliny the Younger, and in the architect Andrea Palladio's (1508–1580) books and buildings reinterpreting classical architecture. Pliny&…
Gardens were often regarded as art, both in theory and as a result of intimate and intricate relations among gardens and other arts. Most famous is Horace Walpole's (1717–1797) theory of the interrelations of the "three arts," poetry, painting, and the garden, in his History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1771–1780). The inclusion of carved or handwritten poet…
East Asian thinking in many cases centered on the nature of the cosmos, the relation of yin and yang, the place of human beings in nature, and so on. These ideas were at once conceptual/intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and experiential/imaginative, designed to provide the scholar with an opportunity for contemplation of nature like that provided within the landscape itself. Miniature gardens ass…
From the sixteenth century, French gardens were used politically in myriad ways: "to impress foreigners with the power of the court, to stir the loyalty of Frenchmen and, after the political and religious crisis deepened in the second half of the sixteenth century, to subtly express the political policy of the state. The court festival, especially as it was masterminded by Catherine de M&#x…
The idea of the garden as a landscape is, in the early 2000s, most familiar as the natural landscape garden, or jardin anglos-chinois, an artistic bequest of the eighteenth-century British. The garden as natural landscape rejecting artificiality and the symmetric knots of formal gardens is an extrapolation of Eden from Paradise Lost (1667). According to Haorace Walpole, Milton is responsible for p…
One variant of the garden as a landscape is the garden based on landscape painting (Ut pictura hortus). Christopher Hussey's landmark study The Picturesque demonstrated the
Japan. Landscape with figures by Unkoku Tjogan, Momoyama period (1573–1615). One of a pair of six-panel screens, ink on paper. AVERY BRUNDAGE COLLECTION, THE ASIAN ART MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO
Japan. Daito…
Contemporary gardens continue to express many of these ancient ideas. In the early twenty-first century, as throughout history, when gardeners adopt and adapt the designs and practices and materials of new technologies or foreign garden traditions, they also adopt—and perhaps change—the underlying ideas. When they use the large rocks of Japanese landscape gardens in a front yard in C…
Adams, William Howard. The French Garden, 1500–1800. New York: Braziller, 1979. Berger, Robert W. In the Garden of the Sun King: Studies on the Park of Versailles Under Louis XIV. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1985. Chambers, Douglas The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale Universit…
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