A garden is never just one thing. It can contain multiple meanings both for the person who creates it and for the person who experiences it. In this post I'm writing about the ways we experience gardens. I'm using the verb experience to represent all of ways gardens work on our senses. Most obvioulsy a garden's appeal can be visual, but there are also smells and possibly sounds—from water, wind, birds or insects. And there is the kinesthetic experience of moving through the garden—the way the path feels under our feet, the way we brush up against foliage, the way perspectives shift as our vantage changes.
While the aesthetic experience of a garden can be particular to its design, its locations, and its features, it is also likely to move us by evoking other places both real and imagined. We can love a garden both for the way it situates us in the present and the ways it transports us far away. Depending on its design, a garden can evoke a forest, a meadow, a desert, a wetland, a jungle.
This evocation of other places can happen at different scales. In a large garden, a stand of trees might evoke a forest by enclosing us in dense foliage and shade. A patch of grasses or wildflowers might stand in for an even larger meadow. In these examples, full size plants are used to simulate themselves as seen in more expansive environments. These effects are enhanced if the garden modulates our exposure to different vistas as we move through it. We round a curve in the garden path and suddenly we find ourselves enclosed in a clearing in the woods, or a meadow suddenly stretches out before us.
But gardens can also work as models or miniatures, in which features do double duty, both representing themselves and something larger. By way of example, I call your attention to Tenshin-en, the Japanese garden on the grounds of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It was created by Kinsaku Nakane and Julie Moir Messervy.
I have neither the space nor the knowledge to discuss all of the traditions and principals that underlie this design, but what I hope is clear from these pictures, is that the garden evokes a miniature landscape, with the raked pebbles representing water, the smaller rocks islands, the larger rocks mountains, and the shrubs wooded hillsides. The goal is not precise miniaturization (like a doll house), but rather an impressionistic representation. Viewing it we are transported to scenes we might have seen in Ukiyo-e prints or travel photos.
Of course there are also large trees in the garden acting to screen out the surrounding city, and adding their own beauty. The garden is not just a miniature landscape, but when the eye is drawn toward the center of the garden that miniature world is evoked. The magic is that we don't see this world as if it was shrunken and confined, as in a terrarium. Rather we become small, standing at the edge of a large, vista, as if we encountered this landscape while out on a hike. In the process the garden expands to feel much larger than its mere quater acre.
But again, this garden is not just a miniature landscape. If we turn away from that vista we also see a stone path that leads us into a forest glen. Working on a very different scale, this grouping of 3 or 4 full size trees become a larger forest. Rather than make us feel small on the edge of a large landscape, it encloses us, surrounding us with all the sense memories of walking in the woods.
In several earlier posts, I discussed my desire to create a miniature landscape in my small urban garden. Since mine is still a work in progress, I thought it would be easier to explain my approach by way of this example, much more brilliant than what I will ultimately produce. And since I'm just an amateur (as per my previous post) mine won't embody all the principals that the experienced landscape architects brought to Tenshin-en, nor the specifically Japanese traditions. But I nevertheless hope it will work.
My rationale for taking this approach is that my plot is very small, and most people will experience it from a single vantage point on the adjoining sidewalk. And so by creating the miniature landscape I hope to at least approximate the effect of Tenshin-en, bringing the viewer to the edge of a landscape as if they were much smaller, and the garden much larger.
As stated above, the garden is still a work in progress, but future posts will provide more details (including photos) to better illustrate what I have in mind.
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