Gardens, aesthetics of

2. Order and design

The variety that gardens display thwarts any attempt to offer a concise definition of this category. Neither appearance nor function yields traits common to all gardens. Nevertheless, there are some common themes that recur in any account. Miller (1993: 15) defines a garden as ‘any purposeful arrangement of natural objects (such as sand, water, plants, rocks, etc.) with exposure to the sky or open air, in which the form is not fully accounted for by purely practical considerations such as convenience’. She goes on to characterize the ratio of form to practicality as an ‘excess of form’. John Dixon Hunt, in a much longer definition, echoes several components of Miller’s proposal. He suggests that a garden is normally out of doors, that it combines inorganic and organic materials and that it is ‘set apart by the greater extent, scope and variety of its design and internal organization’ (Hunt 2000: 15). For Hunt, a garden is specifically an exercise in place-making.

A garden’s excess of form, and/or its greater extent, scope and variety of design and internal organization, can be discerned only if these contrast with the form or design of its immediate surroundings. No garden will be continuous with and indistinguishable from its environs. A boundary or wall of some sort can establish a minimum degree of contrast, but in general we seek gardens that provide relief from the place as it once was or would otherwise have been. Thus, gardens provide shade and water in the desert, pattern and regularity in rampant nature, exotic specimens in lieu of native plants. Note, however, that some gardens succeed in aesthetically appropriating their surroundings. The Japanese practice of ‘borrowed scenery’ allows gardens to extend their apparent reach into the distance. The ha-ha, an eighteenth-century English device, achieved a similar effect by placing fencing in sunken ditches so as not to obstruct the view. Note too that gardens which do contrast with their surroundings need not have, as it were, ‘more’ order. There are alterations of the land that increase order yet do not count as gardens – for example, intensive monoculture where countless acres are planted with a single crop. And, there can be naturalistic gardens that seem to lack any salient principle of order. Overall, then, the attempt to define gardens by establishing a ‘metric’ on form does not succeed.