Garden

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 popularizing in garden design the idea that "'only after the Fall did man have to invoke art to shore a damaged nature'" (Hunt and Willis, p. 79).

During the eighteenth century this account inspired new garden design in England. Since formal gardens exemplified monarchies, the specifics of Milton's description of Eden as a natural landscape rather than as a geometric formal garden (favored by kings) are a function of his intense interest in Puritan antimonarchical politics, adding to their persuasive force.

In 1692 William Temple introduced the Chinese term sharawadgi, of which the origin is undertermined (although he thought Chinese), to refer to beauty that imitated nature rather than relying on geometric pruning and symmetrical designes. Temple defined sharawadgi as that sort of oder "where Beauty shall be great, and strike the Eye, but without any Order or Disposition of Parts, that shall be commonly or easily observ'd" (Hunt and Willis, p. 98). For half a century Chinese "irregular" gardening principles, known also from Matteo Ripa's illustrations of Chinese gardens, were associated with anti-monarchical (even Whig) politics, until Walpole reversed that association by comparing the Chinese gardens described by the French missionary to China Pere Attiret to French formal monarchical gardens.

In addition, visual appropriation of adjacent landscape was integral to gardens in Renaissance Italy, eighteenth-century Britain, and Muromachi, Momoyama, and Edo, Japan, where the term shakkei, or "borrowed scenery," was coined to describe it (Nitschke). In Japan, gardens have been imitating nature for nearly one thousand years, and the rules for such gardens were transmitted both orally and in writing (Slawson).