Gardens, aesthetics of

5. Meaning and representation

Gardens convey meanings of several sorts. First, gardens trigger varied associations. They prompt thoughts of growth and fertility, of death and regeneration, of beauty and sexuality, of the cycle of the seasons and the passage of time. Western garden-goers might think of Paradise and the Garden of Eden, while Chinese garden-goers might think instead of the two abodes of the Immortals, the Western Mountains and the Magical Islands of the Eastern Sea. Such general or cultural associations are usually accompanied by more personal and idiosyncratic trains of thought.Hunt (2000) proposes the phrase ‘mental vistas’ to mark those wide-ranging thoughts which digress from the topic of the garden yet are triggered by it.

The sorts of meanings just mentioned flow from the background knowledge and unique experiences of each visitor. A further category of meaning arises from gardens’ capacities for representation. Just as a representational painting is a painting of a particular person, place, scene or event (which need not exist as depicted and in fact need not exist at all), so too gardens can represent, or refer beyond themselves. In fact, Hunt (2000) suggests that most gardens do so. Borrowing from Cicero and a pair of Italian Renaissance humanists, Hunt proposes an ontology that acknowledges both a First Nature – the natural world as given – and a Second Nature – the changes wrought on First Nature through the agricultural, cultural and industrial activities of humans. Gardens, Hunt then suggests, constitute a Third Nature, and what gardens do is ‘recapitulate’ the other Natures: ‘A ubiquitous feature of garden-making in all cultures has been the inclusion of references within the site to other places, events, and themes’ (Hunt: 2000).

Hunt’s suggestion can be assessed apart from his proposed ontology of the Three Natures. Gardens can represent other places, as when a Victorian garden designer created a miniature version of the Matterhorn in his rock garden. Much more ambitiously, one Chinese emperor made his hunting preserve a microcosm of his entire kingdom by requiring that conquered states present tributes with which he could stock the park. These are cases where the meaning is intended by the garden designer, rather than just imposed by the visitors’ trains of thought.

Consider a more complex case of representation. Commentators say of Henry Hoare’s eighteenth-century garden Stourhead that viewers walking along the circuit were retracing Aeneas’ journey and so walking through a virtual version of ancient Rome. Richard Wollheim’s (1987) account of painting stresses what he calls twofoldness: the fact that a painting is at once a set of marks on canvas and also a painting of a particular scene (see Painting, aesthetics of). Wollheim insists that we are aware of both aspects at once. Something similar is true of those gardens we deem representational. Thus Stourhead is at once a chunk of Wiltshire and a representation of those Roman locales that figured in Aeneas’ adventures. With other representational works of art, for example, novels and paintings, we speak of ‘the world of the work’. Representational gardens sustain this doubleness; it would make sense to acknowledge it in non-representational gardens as well. Miller (1993) extends Susanne Langer’s suggestion that works of art create semblances or virtual worlds (think of the ‘world’ reflected behind your image in a mirror, or of the distinctive ‘world’ created by each novel you read) to include gardens (see Langer, S.K.K.). In Ross (1998) the author builds on Miller’s 1993 proposal, attempting to determine just which properties of a garden should be part of this construal. The garden as virtual world contains the physical garden, but also its aesthetic, representational and expressive properties – the thoughts it prompts, the feelings it arouses.