Garden

The Romans invented the idea of the villa—a home and farm in the countryside—which they believed provided a manner Korea. Anapchi Garden in Kyongju, Unified Silla Period, 674 C.E. MARA MILLER of living superior to that of city life. The villa achieves this goal both physically and spiritually or culturally by affording self-expression, self-cultivation, and self-definition. The garden became the setting and the occasion of this ideal, where by emulating cultured and educated men one became more cultured and educated oneself. (Although the model is largely patriarchal, a few women have done the same: the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo [wife of Cosimo I] in the Boboli Garden, the Countess of Bedford at Moor-Park [Hertforshire], and Mildred Bliss at Dumbarton Oaks, designed by Beatrix Farrand).

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's celebratory descriptions of life in the country influenced literati in their creation of an image of a life worth living—and in their designs of gardens within which to live. The Greek and Roman forms of government presupposed politically active citizens, and the resuscitation of these models as an ideal form elicited from Europeans, Britons, and Americans active participation not only in governing but in reimagining the ways the world might be governed and how social intercourse could be encouraged; creating gardens as representations of these emerging worldviews was part of the process of re-imaging.

The idea of the villa garden as a realm of personal cultivation in which one emulates historical role models is strikingly similar to one set of East Asian ideas of gardens, wherein gardens serve as places for contemplation, scholarship, artistic engagement, and social interaction with other literati. From the time of Wang Wei (699–c.760), East Asian paintings represent gardens of the literati as places of retreat from the corrupt world of everyday affairs, places that made possible the personal cultivation or "self-transformation" according to Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist models. Paintings of the scholar Tao Yuanming (365–457), famous for his integrity, show a rustic fence and a few chrysanthemums depicting the garden whose tending was the pretext of his retirement.

Fruit-bearing trees and other forms of agriculture were important parts of Chinese villas and literati gardens of "retirement" (Clunas), a feature that also recalls Paradise and the notion of plenty.

In both Europe and East Asia, villa gardens as ideal realms eliciting personal cultivation coexist with the ideal of the rustic retreat, be it a shell-lined grotto or a humble thatched hut. Both remained vital for centuries, inspiring garden construction and permitting endless reformulation of intellecutal literati ideas and ideals.

Korea. The courtyard and garden of the Confucian Academy Toson Sowon (established 1574) were derived from Chinese influences. MARA MILLER