Gardens, aesthetics of

1. Garden variety

Gardens are multifarious and each one yields some degree of pleasure or delight. While we admire both natural scenes and works of art, and can in fact regard aesthetically anything at all, our appreciation of gardens is especially rich. Gardens recruit our responses to both art and nature. Since gardens are made, we discern intentions and retrieve meanings; since gardens contain natural materials, alter natural places and participate in natural cycles, we attend to these aspects as well. And of course, gardens contain elements and ensembles of surpassing beauty and interest. Each of these factors contributes to the aesthetic appreciation of gardens. But they also generate philosophical puzzles, since our appreciation and its objects seem in some sense hybrid. Questions arise about the very nature of gardens, about the naming of garden styles, about garden identity and individuation, about the meanings gardens can convey and about the basis for garden appreciation. This entry takes up these problems in turn.

There may have been some cultures which lacked the urge to garden. Nomadic societies, societies living in extreme and inhospitable climates or in regions of Edenic abundance, and extremely troubled societies might all have foregone this activity. Nevertheless, we have knowledge of gardens in many past and present cultures. Such gardens can serve a variety of purposes. They can be utilitarian – to raise crops; religious – to mark sacred spaces: aggrandizing – to proclaim power; accumulative – to display collections; discursive – to make a statement; or aesthetic – to create beauty. Mara Miller (1993) defines grand gardens as those that are especially large, costly, ambitious in their aims and associated with important families or institutions. She lists the following as societies with traditions of grand gardening: Aztec, British, Chinese, Dutch, ancient Egyptian, French, German, Inca, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mayan, Persian and ancient Roman. The grand gardens in any culture are of course supplemented by many more humble or vernacular gardens. While we can take aesthetic pleasure in any of these, the questions to be addressed here are most striking and most challenging when applied to those grand gardens that we acknowledge to be works of art.

Gardens in the traditions just named had distinct looks or styles. They differed along the dimensions large/small, open/enclosed, natural/artificial/geometric, flat/varied, entered/looked at, lush/spare. They also differed in terms of features possessed. A list of these might include flowers, shrubs, trees, groves, topiary, mazes, arbours, walls, paths, stairways, benches, pergolas, courtyards, terraces, statues, temples, follies, grottoes, pools, fountains, streams, lakes, canals and more. Each garden style is distinguished by a few salient traits: the relentless geometry and expanse of the French formal garden, the symbolic rocks and inward-directed vistas of the Chinese scholar garden, the terraced levels and comic waterworks of the Italian villa garden, the raked sand and stones of the Japanese Zen garden. We generally do not refer to gardens using terms and categories drawn from art history (classical garden, Renaissance garden, baroque garden, roccoco garden). Instead, particular garden styles are most often named (as above) by citing the originating culture. This is because garden style is constrained not only by social and cultural factors, but also by such ‘local’ facts as geology, topography, climate, soil, botany and so on. It is very unlikely that the 12-acre cactus garden at the Huntington Library in southern California could be replicated in Yorkshire, or that a version of Vaux Le Vicomte could flourish in Japan.