Garden as Idea, Place, and Action
Ideas – There are two fundamentally different views of the relationship of man to nature. From these differing views, two styles of garden design emerge. From one point of view, nature is seen as chaotic, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and potentially threatening. The garden has represented safety from the threat of wild nature or escape from barbarian outsiders. The garden as nature-under-control is an idealization of what society believed that nature should be and should look like. This leads to design that applies order, geometry, safety, and comfort to the landscape. The alternative point of view sees nature as inherently divine, pure, and good. In this “faith-based” or ecological idea, the garden reassures, serving as a medium of faith – the triumph of the sacred over the profane. A garden evokes these qualities and seeks to imitate and celebrate nature. In philosophy, resolving this dichotomy is known as dialectics – systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict. In the garden, these apparent irreconcilables are clarified and mediated because the garden accepts paradox. Every garden should have one clear, central idea or theme.
Place – The garden also exists as a physical place, with plants, materials, and objects arranged in space. A garden can be anything from estate grounds to flower pots on an eighth-floor terrace. There are palace gardens, corporate gardens, large public gardens, urban “pocket gardens,” and neighborhood gardens; organic gardens, the garden in the shopping mall, the peace garden, the parking lot garden, and the community garden. These characterize the ideals and values of our time and epitomize the genius loci - the location's distinctive atmosphere, or "spirit of place." Landscape designs should always be adapted to the context in which they are located. For example, community gardens result in part from a growing reaction to the privatization of public life and the need for spaces that support social contact and “public-ness.” They also spring from an increased interest in places that invite and inspire ongoing change and modifications through public stewardship and local involvement. As another example, healing or “physic” gardens were an integral part of cloister gardens in the Middle Ages. Today, however, we seek a healing quality in gardens and gardening that acts primarily on mind, not body – medicine to be perceived sensually, to heal scars on the human psyche.
Action – The garden is also a source of action requiring intimate and direct involvement. As an art form, garden design is distinctly different from other art forms that remain static through time. It is a kinetic form of art in that it is always changing, never twice the same. It is the most fragile of the arts in that through time, neglect, whims of fashion, wars, or natural disasters, a garden can disappear. There are only a miniscule number of gardens that have survived the Renaissance, for example. Most of the Renaissance gardens you see were reconstructed in the 19th and 20th centuries to be “in the spirit of the time” of its origin.
Gardening gives us a sense of control over a small patch of earth in spite of all that is left to chance, such as the possibility of drought and insect infestation. Plants become established, mature, and then die. This is the natural order of things, which we attempt to preserve by controlling devastating outside forces. But with control comes responsibility – commitment to stewardship of the earth. We observe, sense, and participate directly in natural processes. Through gardening, we are reconnected to Mother Earth and to the larger ecology of the world in which we live.
The power of the garden lies in its simultaneous existence as an idea, a place, and an action. One cannot examine a garden as a physical place without probing the ideas that generated the selection of its locale, its materials, the making of its geometry, and the vision of the garden designer. One cannot fully understand the idea of the garden without knowing something about the process that created it and the work that is required to maintain it.
From Francis, M. & Hester, R.T. Jr. (1995). The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.