Gardens and Gardening. Origins and History

The efforts of people to create and use gardens operate at the connection of human relationships and the environment. Gardens for enjoyment come out of efforts of humans living within highly developed landscapes to connect with a more pastoral landscape and to extend the comfort and security of the home into the open air.

Gardens for food provide a ground for subsistence or enrichment but also provide a place where people can focus on a basic human activity, on coaxing edible foods from the environment. In some gardens the two purposes—enjoyment and food—are mixed, and aesthetic values are interwoven with utilitarian ones in the design and maintenance of these gardens.

Maintenance workers in Seoul, Korea in 2002 tend to a roadside lawn and flower beds

Although scholars differ in their recognition of the universality of gardens and gardening, they view gardens as markers of culture. In different places and at different times people have had different opinions on just what a "garden" is, how and by whom it is organized, what plants are valued and grown in it, how it is tended and who does the tending, and what general value it has for larger groups of people.

However, whether the owner of a garden does the gardening himself or herself or hires professional gardeners or laborers to do it instead, gardening requires both plan and execution and blends understandings that are aesthetic, utilitarian, and scientific—and that derive from the cultural system of which the garden is an expression.

The garden as an idea is also important in some cultures. Tire idea of an idealized Edenic garden as a place of sanctity and retreat is deeply embedded in Judeo-Christian cultures. When this idea has been combined with ideas about how mixed small-scale farming and certain kinds of land-owning patterns create a hearth for public virtue, as in the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal in the United States, it has played an important role in the political life of a nation. Looking closely at the gardens of a culture, both real and idealized, reveals a great deal about what is important to that culture.

Origins and History. In general, gardening as a kind of intensive attention to the growing of plants for food, flavoring, and medicine followed agriculture as a mode of human manipulation of the environment. Growing a few plants in a garden for food and often at the same time for enjoyment has been traditionally a part of household production.

A culture had to be relatively affluent to support the leisure and expense that the planning, installing, and tending of formal pleasure gardens required. In less-affluent cultures that have had little time for garden dreams or pleasure, more utilitarian gardens and gardening have sometimes provided a crucial margin of food supply and nutrition that has assured survival. At the same time, even the less affluent blended considerations of beauty with those of subsistence in dooryard gardens.

Although the origins of garden making and gardening as human activities are obscure, evidence of early formal gardens is clear in the archeological record. Evidence of gardens in Egypt dates back to 1400 всі , and the wealthy and powerful in early Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian cultures created pleasure gardens that were sometimes quite elaborate in their designs and game parks that provided an additional increment of managed pleasure for the wealthy.

The roots of the modem garden in the West can be found more directly in Renaissance Italy, where the makers of extensive gardens for the aristocracy developed a model that regarded the garden as an extension of the built environment. In these gardens an architecture of straight lines and sharp corners was reinforced by well-trimmed plantings—all opened up to the air.

This model of design was refined by the French and Dutch, who added to it several features, including well-developed smaller gardens off the main garden axis and an emphasis on topiary and plantings of yew and boxwood.

In the eighteenth century a new interest in pastoral landscapes by artists and a general growth in interest in the "natural" contributed to a design revolution in England, especially in the hands of the painter and architect William Kent, Kent, who believed that nature abhors a straight line, designed gardens with meandering paths, undulating reliefs, and clumps of untrimmed trees. Sometimes a view of the sky was blocked by a canopy in these gardens. In the hands of a new generation of English landscape designers, gardens began to look more like parks.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries garden design in Europe was also influenced by the flow of plants from lands explored or colonized by Europeans. One of the purposes of the medieval herb garden and the specialized botanical garden—to preserve specimens of valuable plants for study and use—was introduced into garden design, and many nineteenth-century gardens became not just works of art but also museums of plants.

This purpose was apparent in a new emphasis on beds of dowers in large formal gardens and in the increasing influence of horticulturalists in garden design and development. Romantic reinterpretations of "nature" produced yet more abhorrence for the straight line, and gardens in England—and in some cases on the Continent and in tire United States— acquired a studied informality that emphasized organic flow. As "wilderness" shrunk all over the world, and especially in their own backyards, people in Europe and the United States sought to re-create some measure of wildness in their gardens.

Garden design has had a rich history in Asia as well, producing shinning expressions of human relationships with nature of a less-domineering sort, instead of structures that exalted an architecture of physical control of the environment by humans, Chinese gardens sought to accentuate certain qualities of nature that contributed to moral and civic harmony.

Chinese gardens were meant as places for meditation and as places for the owners and their friends to cultivate— and quietly display—a calm moderation in their relations with nature. Makers of Chinese gardens studiously avoided symmetry and created a landscape of winding paths and exchanges of human-made hills, meanders and cascades of water, carefully placed rocks, and islands and bridges that were designed to evoke sets of linked aesthetic sensations, which, in turn, were inspired by spiritual and moral ideals.

Chinese garden design infiltrated Japan by 1000 ce, but the Japanese impressed upon the Chinese model a penchant for ritual and organization that gave gardens a formality that they often lacked in China. Two good examples of this tendency were the abstract garden of stones placed in an elegant relationship to each other in a bed of raked sand and the tea garden, which was created according to a set of clearly defined rules as a site for the tea ceremonies that were important among the Japanese elite in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

Some Japanese gardens also sought to represent valued landscapes, such as that around Mount Fuji, through highly stylized assemblages of hills and ponds. These were scaled down to garden size, which could vary greatly as long as the essential elements were preserved. Gardens with lakes, streams, islands, hills, bridges, and real trees were created in spaces as small as a foot square. Different elements of Japanese gardens symbolized different spiritual and moral qualities and were arranged to express valued relationships—to be aesthetically pleasing but also "natural.”

Gardens in India were also designed to express religious values and had within them plants and artifices of special importance within the religious traditions of Indian culture. Trees, for example, were venerated by the Hindus. It was in a garden of lotus-covered pools, flowers, and trees that Buddha was reputed to have been born.

After invading Mughals (members of a Muslim dynasty) introduced Islam garden ideas, Indian formal gardens acquired more in the way of flowing water, coming from all comers like the four rivers of Eden. Similar to European styles of gardens previous to the nineteenth century, Indian gardens also expressed an architectural approach to garden design, which saw the garden as an extension of the building or buildings to which it was attached.

Garden design in the twentieth century borrowed from traditions from around the globe. The easy flow of both garden materials and garden ideas from one part of the world to another and an openness to endlessly recombinant possibilities have meant that garden designers have combined elements of design from whatever suits them and have created gardens that are highly inventive expressions, elegant restatements, restorations of classical designs, or fusion failures.

More common, in the United States at least, is the vaguely formal design of parks around public buildings, which are meant to open up spaces around office buildings, communal dwellings, and arterial roads — and not much more. The distinction between garden and park, always not very clear, has been further blurred in urban community vegetable gardens that have also become social gathering places or in greenways that have been carefully cultivated and managed to produce an urban "wild" place for recreation.