The scenic root: A look at the ancient and modern history of the garden
A show at the V&A Dundee traces the many things the garden has been: a paradise; a replica of the world; a sanctuary. What would the ideal one look like today?
Heaven is a well-laid garden. Or at least, the Ancient Persians thought so.
The word paradise is derived from the Persian paradaijah, literally, “walled enclosure”. As far back as 6th century BCE, the paradaijah was organised as a chahar-bagh, a set of its four swathes of green, each meant to embody one of the vital elements of the universe: earth, fire, water and air.
Long, long before this, c. 1000 BCE, royal gardens in China featured intricately designed landscapes that often sought to marry myth with idealised forms of nature.
How did such ideas evolve over time, to yield the neighbourhood parks of today? An intriguing exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee (the first V&A outside London) traces the history of these miniature worlds.
Garden Futures: Designing with Nature is on view until January. Through exhibits that range from ancient and contemporary paintings to photographs, tools, plant specimens, and interactive multimedia installations, the show traces how the idea of the garden goes all the way back to, well, one idea of the start of it all.
In the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the Garden of Eden represents the beginning of life itself.
Exhibits at the show explore how these spaces have always served as sanctuaries; attempts, in increasingly dense, urban built environments, to let a bit of nature back in. In this role, they have acquired social, political and environmental connotations.
Even today, or perhaps more so today, they are a statement of access, luxury, power, wealth. So how have our gardens grown, around the world?
* China, c. 1000 BCE
Myth and nature merge in the earliest signs of royal gardens here, dating to 1000 BCE.
By the 3rd century BCE, there are records of the Qin emperor Shi Huang building a park with a lake and an island at the centre, inspired by legends of an island of immortals. In the Han dynasty that succeeded the Qin, rare plants and animals were housed in royal parks, in a template that spread as noblemen began to design their grounds on similar lines.
Through the centuries, scaled-down waterways, rockeries, dwellings, bridges and plants sought to represent the whole of creation, in miniature scale.
Over time, the precursor to the zen garden took shape, built around gongshi or scholar’s rocks (essentially, boulders shaped by nature in such intriguing ways that one could spend hours in their contemplation).
At V&A Dundee, a watercolour titled A Painting of a Chinese Garden, Guangzhou (c. 1820-1840) bears testament to this past.
* France, in the 1500s
By the 1500s (civilisation dawning considerably later in the West), the French were designing intricate parterre (literally, “on the ground”) flowerbeds meant to be viewed from a height — essentially, from the terrace or higher floors of a chateau.
Surviving parterres such as those at the Palace of Versailles reflect Renaissance ideals of beauty, symmetry and order. Also, luxury, via precise ornamentation.
Some of the designs were so intricate, they were referred to as broderie sur la terre or “embroidery on the ground”. At the V&A exhibit, this style is showcased via a fine-art reproduction of a sketch by the renowned 17th-century landscape architect Claude Mollet. His best-known work is still painstakingly maintained, at the Palace of Versailles.
* England, in the 1700s
By the 18th century, pioneers such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown were looking to contemporary art for inspiration. Inspired by the Picturesque Movement (a mid-18th-century style that sought to “represent the ideal”), gardens designed by Brown and others sought to mimic idealised natural landscapes using cedar, beech and linden trees and sweeping lawns. These parks were marked by a near-total absence of flowers.
Some of these gardens featured “hermitages”, whimsical retreats meant for rest and contemplation. In some cases, eccentric lords of the manor even hired a “hermit” to play out the life of a romantic recluse and complete the picture.
Engraved prints by artists of the time such as John Gendall and JP Neale offer intricate views of such gardens, complete with hermitages (but not hermits)
* USA, in the 20th century
In the early 1940s, Victory Gardens produced up to 40% of America’s fruits and vegetables, according to data from the US National WWII Museum.
A government campaign that urged residents to grow their own food amid critical shortages, trade disruptions and broken supply chains was so successful that 20 million such gardens grew up across America, the museum data states.
A poster that reads Plant a Garden for Victory!, by the artist J Howard Miller, is part of the V&A Dundee exhibit, inviting the viewer to reconsider a proven model in our current times of need.
* India: Then and now
While India does not form part of the V&A exhibit, it is interesting to note that the entire arc represented in the four-room display at the museum is visible in a number of our cities today.
In northern India, parks and monuments still bear the mark of the ornate Mughal-era designs that were influenced by the Persian chahar-bagh — think rectilinear walled sections, large pools, canals, fountains and flowers. Alongside, we have the colonial-era import of the botanical gardens, in which the British originally attempted to recreate English shrubbery, and then began to preserve and showcase specimens of local varieties too.
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Artistic and cultural movements continue to influence the way gardens look. These spaces can also be agents of change, says exhibition co-curator James Wylie.
One actionable way to redraw the norm would be “to look into our immediate environments and ask: Are there ways to encourage pollinators, or different modes of wildlife? To reach beyond manicured lawns and hedges, to create a wild, rich environment that encourages diversity of life?” Wylie adds. “Because the ideal garden, in our times, is one in which our influence is negligible.”
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