Category Archives: garden history

The world’s top ten gardens

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With Top Ten lists becoming img_9392popular, we thought Gardenvisit.com should have a list of the world’s ten best gardens.  But how should it be compiled? Democracy or autocracy? Here are the democratic results: top ten gardens  generated from our garden reviews and rating system. But Winston Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” ( 11. 11, 1947)

So let’s try autocracy: here is Tom Turner’s Top Ten Gardens List, which you can think of a list of the gardens which should be, like the Temple of Abu Simbel, if rising waters were going to flood all the world’s best gardens, by which I mean those which would disappear when the Vale of Kashmir, and Shalimar Bagh, were submerged by global warming. The gardens are in no particular order:

If I had been to Columbus Indiana I think I would include the garden of the Miller house, though I do not know what I would delete from the list. So which is best: democracy or autocracy? – and would readers like to suggest changes to the list?

German garden design and garden tours

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karl_foerster_garten_originalGardenvisit.com is most grateful to Marija Calden for help with adding new gardens updating Garden Finder entries for Germany. See for example: Karl-Foerster-Garten and Kloster Seligenstadt. Marija’s  help  is particularly welcome because German gardens attract less international attention than they deserve and, for example, less attention than the gardens of Italy, France and England, resulting in fewer German garden tours. Yet no one can doubt the country’s deep love of nature in general and gardens in particular, nor the technical expertise of Germany’s landscape architecture profession.  And the design quality of the best German gardens (eg Sans Souci, Herrenhausen, Whilhelmshoehe) is very high. So what’s the problem?

My explanation is that too many German gardens are run by municipalities as public parks. As Jane Austen might have said “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that two old ladies can maintain a garden in better condition than a dozen youths  with the latest equipment’. Love and knowledge are better tools than brawn or engines. Furthermore, a garden requires enclosure. If greenspace in towns is not fenced or walled it is not garden space. It is public open space. The example of Japan provides support for this explanation. Everyone knows of the matchless standard of care in Japanese Gardens. But what of Japanese public parks? Their management is slightly worse than in a typical industrial country: not as good as in most European countries and not even as good as in the public parks of Eastern China.

A garden is a special kind of place. It always has been and it always should be – different.


Nature, culture, creation and the Japanase garden

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sanzenin_templeDavid and Michiki Young in The Art of Japanese Architecture say that the Japanese love of gardens derives from a love of works of art, rather than from a love of nature in its unadulterated form. Japanese gardens are based on the principles of nature and use the materials of nature, but are primarily aesthetic compositions. They say:  ‘Even when temples and shrines are placed in natural settings, such as at Ise Jingu or Sanzenin, vegetation is not usually allowed to reproduce freely but is controlled to produce a natural but tranquil feeling that we have termed “spontaneity of effect.”

Nature is ‘soto’ rather than ‘ichi’. It is a domain which contrasts strongly with the cultural. For the Japanese nature is a place to visit briefly with friends. It is not a place where a person would want to spend much time alone. According to the Youngs, nature is revered by the older generation as the domain of nature spirits or kami. These spirits are not always benevolent. They say although nature is admired because it represents spontaneity, it is also the source of unease, because it is untamed and unpredictable. For the Japanese nature becomes less threatening when it is domesticated. [Image courtesy Marser]

What is sculpture?

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Sound Sculpture

Sound Sculpture

Source:  picasaweb.google.com/…/iF_6Zl5e9zEheng_JrD1rQ

There is considerable ambiguity around the idea of just what sculpture really is. There is not a clear distinction between Physical sculpture (http://www.dexigner.com/design_news/4241.html) embedded with debates about function and form/simple and complex relationships and Sound sculpture (http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/Brassil.html) which is based on the ephemeral partitioning of otherwise boundless space (and time) sometimes made visible through its partnership with water in Water sculpture. What a wondrous medium artists have been given to explore and audiences to delight in….is interpretation really essential, when what can be revealed in so much richer than a few words can begin to express?

 



The Garden of Eden

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Christine’s post on the Lilypad Islands have a Garden of Eden quality. Vincent Callebaut propose a New Eden for us to inhabit when we have finished wrecking the Earth. The Lilypad Islands remind me what an excellent idea cruise ships are for other people’s holidays. Providing there is no pollution, just think how much better the all the world’s coasts would be if all the holidaymakers could be moved offshore.

Athanasius Kircher’s drawing ( 1675) shows the Garden of Eden between the Tigris and Euphrates, west of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. He shows the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, four angels guarding the gates and Cain killing Abel in the top-left corner. Majority opinion amongst modern commentators favours Kircher’s location of the Garden of Eden in Southern Iraq, but there are many competing theories.