Garden


A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control. The garden can incorporate both natural and artificial materials.
Gardens often have design features including statuary, follies, pergolas, trellises, stumperies, dry creek beds, and water features such as fountains, ponds, waterfalls or creeks. Some gardens are for ornamental purposes only, while others also produce food crops, sometimes in separate areas, or sometimes intermixed with the ornamental plants. Food-producing gardens are distinguished from farms by their smaller scale, more labor-intensive methods, and their purpose. Flower gardens combine plants of different heights, colors, textures, and fragrances to create interest and delight the senses.
The most common form today is a residential or public garden, but the term garden has traditionally been a more general one. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological gardens. Western gardens are almost universally based on plants, with garden, which etymologically implies enclosure, often signifying a shortened form of botanical garden. Some traditional types of eastern gardens, such as Zen gardens, however, use plants sparsely or not at all. Landscape gardens, on the other hand, such as the English landscape gardens first developed in the 18th century, may decide to omit flowers altogether.
Landscape architecture is a related professional activity with landscape architects tending to engage in design at many scales and working on both public and private projects.

Etymology

The etymology of the word gardening refers to enclosure: it is from Middle English gardin, from Anglo-French gardin, jardin, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German gard, gart, an enclosure or compound, as in Stuttgart. See Grad for more complete etymology. The words yard, court, and Latin hortus, are cognates—all referring to a defined enclosed space.
The term "garden" in British English refers to a small enclosed area of land, usually adjoining a building. This would be referred to as a yard in American English.

Uses

A garden can have aesthetic, functional, and recreational uses:
  • Cooperation with nature
  • * Plant cultivation
  • * Garden-based learning
  • Observation of nature
  • * Bird- and insect-watching
  • * Reflection on the changing seasons
  • Relaxation
  • * Placing down different types of garden gnomes
  • * Family dinners on the terrace
  • * Children playing in the garden
  • * Reading and relaxing in a hammock
  • * Maintaining the flowerbeds
  • * Pottering in the shed
  • * Basking in warm sunshine
  • * Escaping oppressive sunlight and heat
  • Growing useful produce
  • * Flowers to cut and bring inside for indoor beauty
  • * Fresh herbs and vegetables for cooking

    History

Asia

China

The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in the valley of the Yellow River, during the Shang dynasty. These gardens were large, enclosed parks where the kings and nobles hunted game, or where fruit and vegetables were grown. Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan.''You was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants. During the Qin dynasty, yuan became the character for all gardens. The old character for yuan is a small picture of a garden; it is enclosed in a square which can represent a wall, and has symbols which can represent the plan of a structure, a small square which can represent a pond, and a symbol for a plantation or a pomegranate tree.
A famous royal garden of the late Shang dynasty was the Terrace, Pond and Park of the Spirit built by King Wenwang west of his capital city, Yin. The park was described in the Classic of Poetry this way:
Another early royal garden was Shaqui, or the Dunes of Sand, built by the last Shang ruler, King Zhou. It was composed of an earth terrace, or tai, which served as an observation platform in the center of a large square park. It was described in one of the early classics of Chinese literature, the Records of the Grand Historian. According to the Shiji, one of the most famous features of this garden was the Wine Pool and Meat Forest. A large pool, big enough for several small boats, was constructed on the palace grounds, with inner linings of polished oval shaped stones from the seashore. The pool was then subsequently filled with wine. A small island was constructed in the middle of the pool, where trees were planted, which had skewers of roasted meat hanging from their branches. King Zhou and his friends and concubines drifted in their boats, drinking the wine with their hands and eating the roasted meat from the trees. Later Chinese philosophers and historians cited this garden as an example of decadence and bad taste.
During the Spring and Autumn period, in 535 BC, the Terrace of Shanghua, with lavishly decorated palaces, was built by King Jing of the Zhou dynasty. In 505 BC, an even more elaborate garden, the Terrace of Gusu'', was begun. It was located on the side of a mountain, and included a series of terraces connected by galleries, along with a lake where boats in the form of blue dragons navigated. From the highest terrace, a view extended as far as Lake Tai, the Great Lake.

India

Manasollasa is a twelfth century Sanskrit text that offers details on garden design and a variety of other subjects. Both public parks and woodland gardens are described, with about 40 types of trees recommended for the park in the Vana-krida chapter. Shilparatna, a text from the sixteenth century, states that flower gardens or public parks should be located in the northern portion of a town.

Japan

The earliest recorded Japanese gardens were the pleasure gardens of the Emperors and nobles. They were mentioned in several brief passages of the, the first chronicle of Japanese history, published in 720 CE. In spring 74 CE, the chronicle recorded: "The Emperor Keikō put a few carp into a pond, and rejoiced to see them morning and evening". The following year, "The Emperor launched a double-hulled boat in the pond of Ijishi at Ihare, and went aboard with his imperial concubine, and they feasted sumptuously together". In 486, the chronicle recorded that "The Emperor Kenzō went into the garden and feasted at the edge of a winding stream".

Korea

n gardens are a type of garden described as being natural, informal, simple and unforced, seeking to merge with the natural world. They have a history that goes back more than two thousand years, but are little known in the west. The oldest records date to the Three Kingdoms period when architecture and palace gardens showed a development noted in the Korean History of the Three Kingdoms.

Europe

was not recognized as an art form in Europe until the mid 16th century when it entered the political discourse, as a symbol of the concept of the "ideal republic". Evoking utopian imagery of the Garden of Eden, a time of abundance and plenty where humans didn't know hunger or the conflicts that arose from property disputes. John Evelyn wrote in the early 17th century, "there is not a more laborious life then is that of a good Gard'ners; but a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; Natural and Instructive, and such as contributes to Piety and Contemplation." During the era of Enclosures, the agrarian collectivism of the feudal age was idealized in literary "fantasies of liberating regression to garden and wilderness".

France

Following his campaign in Italy in 1495, where he saw the gardens and castles of Naples, King Charles VIII brought Italian craftsmen and garden designers, such as Pacello da Mercogliano, from Naples and ordered the construction of Italian-style gardens at his residence at the Château d'Amboise and at Château Gaillard, another private résidence in Amboise. His successor Henry II, who had also travelled to Italy and had met Leonardo da Vinci, created an Italian garden nearby at the Château de Blois. Beginning in 1528, King Francis I created new gardens at the Château de Fontainebleau, which featured fountains, parterres, a forest of pine trees brought from Provence, and the first artificial grotto in France. The Château de Chenonceau had two gardens in the new style, one created for Diane de Poitiers in 1551, and a second for Catherine de' Medici in 1560. In 1536, the architect Philibert de l'Orme, upon his return from Rome, created the gardens of the Château d'Anet following the Italian rules of proportion. The carefully prepared harmony of Anet, with its parterres and surfaces of water integrated with sections of greenery, became one of the earliest and most influential examples of the classic French garden.
The French formal garden contrasted with the design principles of the English landscape garden namely, to "force nature" instead of leaving it undisturbed. Typical French formal gardens had "parterres, geometrical shapes and neatly clipped topiary", in contrast to the English style of garden in which "plants and shrubs seem to grow naturally without artifice." By the mid-17th century axial symmetry had ascended to prominence in the French gardening traditions of Andre Mollet and Jacques Boyceau, from which the latter wrote: "All things, however beautiful they may be chosen, will be defective if they are not ordered and placed in proper symmetry." A good example of the French formal style are the Tuileries gardens in Paris which were originally designed during the reign of King Henry II in the mid-sixteenth century. The gardens were redesigned into the formal French style for the Sun King Louis XIV. The gardens were ordered into symmetrical lines: long rows of elm or chestnut trees, clipped hedgerows, along with parterres, "reflect the orderly triumph of man's will over nature."
The French landscape garden was influenced by the English landscape garden and gained prominence in the late eighteenth century.