Gardens, aesthetics of

6. Gardens and other arts

Thus far this entry has concentrated on gardens in their own right and on gardens that are themselves works of art. But our appreciation of gardens is also enriched by their relations with other arts. Certainly gardens include other arts, especially sculpture and architecture. They also figure in other arts, as when gardens become the subject of painting and poetry. In China, the arts of landscape painting, poetry and calligraphy were integral parts of the enjoyment of scholar gardens. In eighteenth-century England, the sister arts tradition was expanded to include gardening as a third sibling to painting and poetry, suggesting that gardens can function in the same way as poems and paintings. Writers discussing certain eighteenth-century British gardens insisted that they had to be read, that they had meanings that were to be extracted by the visitors who strolled through them. Ronald Paulson (1973: 878) says of a visitor’s experience at Stowe, an eighteenth-century garden in Buckinghamshire, that ‘what he saw was virtually a page from an emblem book, and page followed page as he strolled along the garden path’.

Charting the demise of the poetic or emblematic garden, Hunt proposed that later eighteenth-century audiences lacked the classical learning necessary to unpack the messages. A new, non-discursive source of garden meaning, however, came with the cult of the picturesque. This aesthetic category embraced such qualities as roughness, irregularity and sudden variation. One picturesque theorist, Sir Uvedale Price, advocated that landowners improve their estates based on the principles apparent in the best landscape paintings of the time. This cross-fertilization among the arts persists to the present day. Photography and film yield new images of gardens, while earthworks and environmental art provide a late-twentieth-century sibling that might invigorate the art of gardening and inspire garden designers to develop new forms, gestures and meanings for our time.