Garden

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 poetic quotations is found frequently in Asian and European gardens of nearly all styles, and visiual allusions to well-known poems, legends, or stories provide the basis for garden vignettes, such as the flat angular "eight-plank" bridges alluding to the tales of Ise in Japanese gardens, as well as themes for garden "rooms" or motifs. Highly influential gardens have been designed—or described—by poets, most famously Murasaki Shikibu (d. c. 1014–1020), John Milton, Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Ishikawa Jozan (1583–1672), and Yuan Mei (eighteenth century).

Italian, French, German, and British formal gardens were used for theatrical entertainments and masques, sometimes in pavilions designed for the purpose (later gardens included shallow amphitheaters), while masques, operas, and other forms of early modern theater often had scenes set in a garden. Architecturally, gardens encompass—or are encompassed by—a house, palace, or temple. But formal gardens, English "natural" landscape gardens, European-American romantic gardens, and large Chinese gardens also incorporated small pavilions or "follies"; Japanese gardens often feature small rustic tea houses, or halls (later donated to temples). All have bridges both decorative and useful.