Chinese gardens - a few details

Beautiful bamboo plant labels used in Suzhou. I searched in vain for some of these to bring home...the lack of a free market shows in my utter inability to find any garden implements or artifacts for purchase in what is widely touted as China's garden city. Meanwhile, the stalls outside the gardens have the same selection of silk purses and gold plastic Buddhas being hawked all over China. I finally found some garden items at a flower market in Beijing, but there were few things sized for bringing back on the plane and most items were of the sort that are already imported to the states, anyway.

Doubled clay pots used for setting out plants...the bog standard Chinese pot is shorter and wider than the typical Western one, and has a narrow rolled lip rather than our wide flattened one. I searched in vain for these, too, even in local markets where there were no tourists and I was pointed at and asked for photos.

The doubled pot technique was often used for the display of potted plants in the garden as well. When container plants were present, they were usually placed around the perimeter of an area of open courtyard, serving to soften the hard outlines of the rock formations. In the second photo above, the pots are placed upon the same rounded stones that serve as foundations for the posts of the pagodas.

Young trees are uniformly staked with wooden poles for bracing; more attractive, I think, than our outward leaning tree stakes. The trunks were often wrapped with rope; I'm not sure why (perhaps to ward off some insect?) but I like the way it looks. The wrapped trunks seem sculptural, especially in mass municipal plantings. When evergreens are braced, the poles are extended through the foliage and out the sides in a giant 'x' reminiscent of the chopstick hairstyles once favored by well-to-do Chinese.

Chinese gardens - the floors

Well, they aren't grass. One of the several reasons Chinese gardens can seem so alien is that there is very little of the greensward that serves as the 'floor' of most of our landscapes. In Suzhou, it is only the Humble Administrator's Garden, the largest of those open to the public, that has any expanse of lawn, and that is perhaps why it is also the one that feels most familiar, most comprehensible, to at least this westerner.

I don't think it's that the Chinese don't like the lawn, and certainly a grass floor fits well with their conceptions of the natural landscape; it's simply that rocks are far more important. And in a small garden, where there is not perhaps room for both, rocks definitely win the day.

Within a single garden, there may be twenty or so different arrangements of small rocks and pebbles and roof tiles set on edge, mortared into place in decorative patterns. They are more than paths, though they are used as such--spreading out across courtyards and walkways alike to add a subtly changing carpet-like quality to the spaces.

These garden floors are one of my 'take-home' ideas from China.

Chinese gardens - fenestrations (windows and doors)

All of this would be exceedingly claustrophobic were it not for the extensive use of windows and doors to relieve the solidity of the divisions. Like most, I was familiar with the round moon gate, but I was surprised at the diversity of window and door openings I saw in the gardens of Suzhou.

Chinese gardens - Layers of Enclosure

It is with some trepidation that I embark on commentary within a garden tradition so different from my own. But if I can't completely understand the Chinese garden, I can at least record my observations, most particularly as to what strikes me in contrast to the Western garden traditions I do know.

But first, what both traditions have in common, from a 1200 year old account of Yong-zhou (which is quite near Suzhou) recently posted by Plinius at some-landscapes:

Liu Zong-yuan went exploring with two companions and found a beautiful spot near Gu-mu pond. Above a fish-weir, they saw a hill covered with trees and bamboo, and littered with a landscape of rocks that resembled strange animals. The whole site covered no more than an acre and, to his joy, Liu Zong-yuan found that it was available for purchase. Having bought it, the three companions 'went to get tools, scything away the undesirable plants and cutting down the bad trees, which we set fire to and burned. Then the fine trees stood out, the lovely bamboo were exposed, and the unusual rocks were revealed. When we gazed out from upon it, the heights of the mountains, the drifting of clouds, the currents of streams, and the cavorting of birds and beasts all cheerfully demonstrated their art and skill in performance for us below the hill. When we spread out our mats and lay down there, the clear and sharply defined shapes were in rapport with our eyes; the sounds of babbling waters were in rapport with our ears; all those things that went on forever in emptiness were in rapport with our spirits; and what was as deep and still as an abyss was in rapport with our hearts.'

All garden traditions seem to move from encompassing the natural landscape, to altering it, and finally to re-creating it. Had he lived in the Ming Dynasty, Liu Zong-yuan would have returned to his home and spent perhaps the rest of his life (for Chinese garden-making was considered the intellectual pursuit of a lifetime, always being perfected, always unfinished) making a landscape that condensed the beauty of the Gu-mu pond into the teapot of his private garden.The scholar gardens of Suzhou are and always were courtyard gardens, retreats created within an urban setting. There is, to my admittedly incomplete knowledge, no Chinese analogue to the country estate landscapes of Western tradition.

So the first point in experiencing the private Chinese gardens (the "scholar's gardens") is that they are quite heavily enclosed. Not by just a single courtyard wall, as in the Western tradition, but by layers of houses and teahouses, walkways and porches and narrow corridors as well as intervening walls creating mutiple small spaces. You feel as you walk the lifetime of perfecting the garden; that its structures and pathways have been altered and added on to, connected and re-connected many times, becoming progressively more dense. As the built features are assymetrically arranged, traversing a Chinese garden can be a disorienting, maze-like experience, and they are difficult to go round quickly or with any pre-defined plan. Which is perhaps the point.

Suzhou and its gardens

If you're a garden historian visiting China, there is one destination that matters most and that is Suzhou. Known as the 'Venice of China', its extensive hydraulic network of canals from the lower Yangtze made it easy to bring water (an essential element of Chinese landscapes) into the garden, and its temperate climate and high humidity is ideal for the characteristic plants of the Chinese tradition as expressed not just on the ground but also in literature and art. There is a Chinese saying that 'the garden is an artistic recreation of nature; a landscape painting in three dimensions' and in fact the practices of painting, poetry and calligraphy were considered inseparable from the physical creation of the garden. All were the province of the wealthy scholars of south China in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The private gardens that they created, for retreat and meditation and hosting fellow scholars, are best preserved in Suzhou.

Gardenhistorygirl goes to China!

The lack of posting lately has been due to a trip to China...not the trip itself (I am now sucessfully blogging from Tianjin), but the preparation for it. For though I am a garden history girl, I still earn my living as a Woman of Science and part of that is attending International Scientific Conferences at which to present the all important Results of Research. And the laboratory preparation for that has been intense and taxing.

But now that I'm here, there is time to blog and I've just spent the last two days seeing the historic gardens of Suzhou (that's the 'Master of the Nets Garden' above), so many more photos and discussion of Chinese gardens to come.