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Context and Form in Garden Classification
David Fenner
Abstract
Correctly classifying a garden is important because it allows us to appreciate a garden for what it is, create maintenance agendas for gardens, compare gardens to others in appropriate ways, and meaningfully evaluate gardens. We may correctly classify a garden by first deciding on an appropriate taxonomic approach and, second, by fitting gardens into their appropriate taxa. The first is achieved through justifying the organizing schema by ensuring that it significantly meets the goals mentioned above, results in meaningful and satisfying garden appreciation, and is comprehensive in scope—the creation of this taxonomic approach necessarily includes reference to a garden’s context. The second is achieved through focus on those perceptual elements of a particular garden’s form that appropriately set its membership in a given taxon; in contrast to the creation of a taxonomic approach, the process of placing a garden in a given taxon focuses on the perceptually available form of that garden.
Key Words
garden; classification; form; style; garden appreciation
1. Why correct classification is important
Every garden is an indissoluble amalgam of natural objects, typically plants, frequently augmented with artifactual objects, and a human-imposed arrangement of those objects—or, in other words, a design, one that differs from the straightforward utility of natural arrangements that underwrite agricultural or recreational applications such as campsites or sports fields.[1] Because of the first, gardens require regular tending, and because of the second, that tending has an aesthetic dimension, if we understand aesthetic dimension to either be a result of or endemic to possessing a design that is not reducible to one solely focused on practical utility. Absent the first, we are likely describing an art or aesthetic construction; absent the second, we are likely describing an environment that is not a garden.
A garden’s design sets the original contours of the ideal form of that garden. But since gardens change,[2] the ideal form of a garden will also change. It is up to gardeners to decide what tending should be done to bring a garden to an idealized version of itself, whether that idealization is set by the original design of a garden, by an intentional redesign, which could entail altering the garden’s form and purpose, or by an evolution of the original design into a new one. An original design cannot be maintained in an unevolved form through the life of a garden, since plants, especially trees, grow; plants die from age, predation, and storms; some plants must be pruned differently as they mature; artifactual elements must be repaired or replaced; and so forth. But for a garden to maintain its identity as a garden—that is, as any garden—and for it to continue to meet its purpose(s), some maintenance of an appropriately evolving realization of that garden’s design must occur. The form will change through the life of the garden, but it must not change too much or the garden will end up being a different garden.[3] Gardeners who understands the vision, purpose, and style of a garden in its present form will be able to tailor their work to an appropriately evolving understanding of what the garden in their care should be.
The correct classification of gardens is important to setting maintenance agendas so that the gardener—whether the garden’s original designer as in residential and allotment gardens or one decades removed from the garden’s creation—is able to make decisions as to what tasks should inform the gardener’s efforts. The gardener must have a set of guiding principles, so to speak, and those principles are derived from the form of the garden being tended, a form that is the result of a particular design that itself results from a particular vision of what that garden should be and contain, largely dependent on the purpose(s) that garden is meant to serve. None of this is to suggest that gardeners must maintain gardens according to the contours of their original designs. On occasion, an original design may be important—because, for instance, the designer occupied a special place in the history of garden design—and so gardeners work to maintain those original designs. But on some occasions, a garden will have been redesigned, perhaps a plurality of times, and with a redesign may come a different conception of that garden, complete with a different guiding vision, different purpose(s), and so different formal elements. On most, if not all, occasions, the natural growth of a garden requires an evolution of the contours of the garden’s design, and gardeners must then use their best judgment to maintain that garden according to the evolution occasioned by natural growth and events like storms toppling trees and so forth. Managing natural growth typically can be achieved through an incremental process where gardeners are largely responding to local natural processes; in cases like this, a gardener focuses on retaining the form of the garden, keeping it the kind of garden it is. Dealing with fallen trees and the like can require redesign work, but of course a redesign also could be a planned and deliberative matter. Significant redesign can result in a garden being a different kind of garden. Gardeners’ understanding of the proper classification of the garden they work provides the guides they require to create their maintenance agendas.
This is different from most other art and aesthetic forms, where regular or routine maintenance is not required for those objects to retain their artistic and aesthetic properties. The garden’s aesthetic properties are made manifest through natural processes, and through the shaping of the contours those processes likely will take, shaping that happens at the hands of gardeners who follow their own aesthetic sensibilities in management of that garden’s present design. In the case of most autographic art objects, modification after the work is completed is not permitted, and even in the case of performances and productions of allographic artworks, these typically follow what Jerrold Levinson refers to as an archform, such as a musical score, to assure, among other things, that identity conditions are met.[4] Yet modification, even when this involves modest redesign efforts, is necessary in the case of gardens. This makes classification —and getting the classification correct —a somewhat different enterprise in the case of gardens than in the case of other art and aesthetic forms. Garden classification, therefore, takes on at least greater routine significance—that is, we must be careful in an ongoing way to get our classifications of gardens correct.
Every garden is unique. Each garden has plants that grow according to certain habits that are influenced by climate, irrigation, soil composition, pests, other plants, and how they are tended by gardeners. The combination of particular physical setting factors, particular characteristics of a plant, and the proclivities of particular gardeners result in plant components in every garden unique to that garden. A plant is like every other growing thing, humans included, such that no two are exactly the same. As plants typically comprise much of the contents of a garden,[5] so the same is true of a garden.
Nonetheless, gardens share important traits with other gardens, and salient commonality among gardens allows us to group them together in sets, where all members of that set share identifying traits. Classifying a garden correctly is to identify the kind of garden a garden is or what style it is or to what genre it belongs. Stephanie Ross sees garden style and garden genre as different things. For her, a garden style denotes a kind of garden that accords with a particular “author, period, place, or school” and a garden genre is more generalized, capturing the defining essence of an object.[6] But for the purposes of this paper, I will use ‘kind,’ ‘sort,’ ‘class,’ ‘style,’ and ‘genre’ interchangeably, because more than one taxonomic system may be justified when it comes to garden classification, and one system may use classification vocabulary differently than another.
Correctly classifying a garden is important for many reasons, in addition to the one mentioned above. First, correct identification of a garden is important for appreciating the garden for what it is. Garden appreciation begins with valuing the garden to be appreciated, at least enough to warrant investing some attention and allowing it, however briefly, to be the focus of an experience. In appreciating a garden, we seek to appreciate those aspects of it that make it worthy of attention. We seek to focus not on irrelevancies but on what enhances the value of this garden. Accurate classification aids our focus, guiding our attention to those aspects that typify the sort of value that the sort of garden we seek to appreciate possesses.
Second, identifying a garden as participating in a certain style is valuable because it allows us to compare that garden to others in appropriate ways. This is not to say that only roji gardens (Japanese or Japanese-style tea gardens) may be compared to other roji gardens, but if we know that a garden is a roji garden, we can meaningfully compare it to gardens that are similar and those that are different. If we were to take each garden as a type of which there is a single token, then if our purpose in comparison is, say, aesthetic, few function-forward gardens, such as kitchen gardens or even botanical gardens, will stand up to pleasure gardens. It is not that we must only compare like-garden with like-garden, but we should be conscious of the elements present in various garden styles so that our comparisons are meaningful.
Third, and following from the point directly above, correctly identifying a garden’s style allows us to assess or evaluate that garden meaningfully. Some gardens are better than others, and later versions of gardens are better, or worse, than their earlier versions. To know on what our attention should focus—in terms of which aspects of the garden are the most important to the style of the garden under our attention—allows for rendering judgments about gardens that seem justified. For instance, I can know that a certain roji garden is a good roji garden because a roji garden has certain features that are central to its identity as a roji garden, and these are the features I want to bring under critical consideration to assess the worth of this particular garden.
2. Deciding on a taxonomy and the role of context
What is common in all the reasons expressed above for why garden classification is important is that accurate classification allows for proper appreciation of a garden. This appreciation is not narrowly aesthetic in character, that is, focused exclusively on a garden’s perceptually available, aesthetic-property-subvenient properties, or at least not simplistically so. Yet, in a deeper way, the appreciation might be characterized as aesthetic because the appreciation is directed to two things, to the design of the garden—the arrangement of its natural and artifactual components by its creator(s)—and the charms of the components themselves—the plants, fountains, and so forth. In this second sense, “aesthetic” does not exclusively reference what is perceptually available; it involves various contextualities and external relations the garden bears to other objects and events. So, for instance, it would be relevant to appreciating a garden that it expresses through its design a particular philosophy of what a garden should be. Or how that garden continues an evolution of gardens, say through time or through geographical spread. Or how the garden contributes to the establishment of a garden designer’s oeuvre. There are many ways to construct an organizing schema or taxonomy of gardens.
This is the first step in correct garden classification. The justification for the taxonomy is what establishes the classification as correct. That is, “correct” is dependent on the strength of the classification system, and so the goals that are enumerated above are only met to the degree to which the classification system is itself justified. And, in turn, the garden taxonomy that (1) allows us to meet our goals, (2) meets them in significant ways, (3) ultimately results in garden appreciation, that is, appreciation of particular gardens, perhaps even on particular occasions, that seems to the practiced garden-appreciator meaningful or satisfyingly deep, and (4) is comprehensive, in that every garden we know has its place or can have a place, as the taxonomy is flexible in terms of adding new taxa, is a classification schema that is justified. Taxonomies as organizing systems are based on choices that humans make about how the world might be divided, sorted, and combined. We can see the subjective hand in how granular a particular taxonomy might be, as the division between humans who are “splitters” and those who are “lumpers” can be seen in their taxonomic preferences.
An example of a garden taxonomy is one focused on the history of gardens. Garden historians have offered a variety of schemas that organize gardens by style; these schemas typically are temporally sequential, geographically organized, and index gardens to their cultural contexts. Examples include Linda Chisholm’s The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens; Elizabeth Barlow Roger’s Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History; Christopher Thackery’s The History of Gardens; and Tom Turner’s Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC-2000 AD.[7] Each approach assembles a set of gardens in an affinity group, and what gardens are included in each set differ somewhat by author, but the trend common to each is a historical progression, organized by region and culture, with some apparent outliers folded in to sets of gardens with which they share affinities, as seen by an author. Insights about the movement of garden design through history are offered based on how the authors understand what binds gardens together into sets. We commonly see historical progressions of gardens that move through the following stages:
- Southwest Asia and Egypt
- Classical Greece
- Ancient Rome
- Persian Gardens and Islam
- Medieval China and Japan
- Medieval Europe and Baroque Gardens
- Renaissance Italy
- French, and broadly European, Formalism
- English Naturalism
- German Naturalism
- English Horticulturalism (the Gardenesque, Arts and Crafts)
- American Naturalism
- Beaux-Arts
- American Modernism
- Brazilian Modernism (with a primary focus on Robert Burle Marx)
- Ecologicalism (the New Perennial Movement, the Sheffield School)
- Postmodernism
One can witness in such historical approaches something akin to the development and evolution of styles— for instance, as we see the movement of Persian gardens from the Middle East to Southeast Asia and to Southern Europe—but the focus is not typically on how one garden style led to another, but rather what was happening across the globe from, as Turner suggests, 2000 BCE to 2000 CE.
A second useful organizing schema focuses on the evolution/development of garden styles as they moved from the world’s oldest gardens, that is, for which we have any evidence, to contemporary gardens. One could work out an anthropology (kiposology?) of gardens as they developed and evolved either through history or as they spread culturally and geographically, specifically highlighting the connection that garden design philosophies had on one another. This is something John Dixon Hunt specifically calls for in his 2000 book, Greater Perfections; something like what Derek Plint Clifford offers in his 1962 book, The History of Garden Design.[8] Following is a sketch of such a taxonomy.
- From the first century BCE through the first century CE, we get a variety of Roman writers on agriculture and architecture, including Cato the Elder, Varro, Cicero, Vitruvius, Virgil, Columella, and both Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. Of these, only Columella discussed gardens explicitly, but their impact on the design of renaissance Italian gardens, as they substantively echoed the architecture they surrounded, was palpable.
- The gardens designed and developed in the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279), partly through their depiction in landscape paintings, had an influence on the gardens of Heian Japan (794-1185).
- The Persian gardens of Iran had a strong influence on the Mughal gardens to the east and on the Moorish gardens to the west.
- Italian baroque gardens had a strong influence on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, with the jardin à la française garden style then moving across Europe.
- The ideas of British and German Enlightenment philosophers had an influence on the development of eighteenth-century British naturalistic and Picturesque garden styles, and then later on naturalistic garden styles in the Americas.
- Nineteenth-century British Gardenesque gardens had an influence on Arts-and-Crafts gardens, which in turn had an influence on American Gilded Age Beaux-Arts style gardens; and it was the reaction to the Beaux-Arts style that in the US set in motion the twentieth-century’s California-focused, modernist gardens.
- The world of modern art had a strong influence on Roberto Burle Marx’s Brazilian modernist gardens and the postmodern (if “postmodern” is a descriptor each would embrace) garden designs of Charles Jencks, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Irwin, Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker, and Claude Cormier.
- Sensibilities derived from the recognition of climate change fueled ecologically focused movements in American and European garden design, such as the New Perennial movement and the Sheffield School.
This is simply a sketch—I am unqualified to answer Hunt’s call to do this work—but the point is that it should be possible to trace the evolution of gardens. But it is clear even from this sketch that such an approach to garden classification would be fascinating and useful.
A third useful taxonomy of gardens highlights the instrumental relationship between a garden and those who visit it, that is, focuses on the purpose of the garden. Elsewhere, a coauthor and I offer an inventory of gardens based on their purposes, the list of which follows.[9] A focus on garden purpose will be comprehensive because at those times when the taxonomy seems incomplete, we can simply add a new taxon to capture some new garden purpose not yet represented in our list.
- Gardens that focus on the production of consumables.
- Gardens that focus principally on the achievement of aesthetic reward.
- Gardens that focus on conservation, scientific, or educational purposes.
- Gardens that focus on matters of identity.
- Gardens that focus on psychological, religious, spiritual, and ritualized purposes.
- Gardens that principally provide venues for activities humans value.
In the creation of each of these three taxonomical approaches, we see the centrality of understanding context—the relationships that gardens bear to each other; to their cultural, religious, and regional contexts; to the particulars of their connections to the events surrounding their creations; and to their geomorphological and climatological contexts. We might think of the historical and “anthropological” taxonomies as focused specifically on the relations that gardens bear to other gardens, as described by designers and historians. And we might think of the taxonomy focused on purpose as also focused on garden reception, on how garden visitors actually use(d) the gardens in question.
In addition, the identification of a particular garden as participating in a certain garden style is occasionally made by appealing to garden designers’ intentions, or our best re-creation of what we suspect are garden designers’ intentions. For instance, some gardens that began as the pleasure gardens of the wealthy have evolved into the basis for botanical gardens, for example, the Huntington in California. The two gardens may share similar perceptual features, and so it is to the intentions of patrons, garden designers, and gardeners, that is, to contextual information, that we turn to appreciate the central difference between the once-personal-pleasure garden and the now-botanical garden.
One might imagine a garden classification schema that is focused exclusively, and has as its exclusive content, a garden’s perceptual properties: gardens that are colorful are classed alongside other gardens that are colorful, such as Keukenhof, Butchart, and Longwood; gardens that are focused on trees are classed together, as we do when we call them “arboreta”; gardens that are focused on parterres are classed together, as are more naturalistic or even meadow-focused gardens; and so forth. But while this is certainly one way to classify gardens, it is not revelatory of what inspired and motivated those who designed them—or redesigned them—to work in the styles they did, or to mix styles to create new sorts of gardens.[10] It is not illuminating about why garden designers made the choices they did. More to the point, a simple classification system that focuses only on what is perceptually available fails to meet our needs: it does not provide a useful guide to creating maintenance agendas; it does not provide a useful means of comparing gardens with one another or evaluating them in ways that produce claims that seem justified; it does not, at least not obviously, enhance experiential appreciation of a garden. A garden’s contextuality—matters of who the garden designer was; when it was designed; what country, culture, or religion the gardener designed within; who the commissioner or the patron of the garden was; and so forth—is central to our choices of taxonomic approaches.
3. Placing a garden into a taxon through appreciation of its perceptual form
Our choice of taxonomical approach should include careful consideration of the contexts in which gardens are nested, but this is not the case with determination of whether a particular garden fits within a particular taxon. Here we must appeal to those features of a garden that are available in an unmediated way to the senses. It is the only way we can know that a particular garden belongs to a certain taxon, no matter what taxonomy we ultimately decide to employ. If a garden exhibits the parterre de broderie, it is not a New Perennial garden. If a garden produces consumables that are harvested (that is, only does this), it is not a botanical garden. If a garden lacks four channels of water that divide the garden into quadrants, it is not a chahar bagh garden. None of this is to say that these combinations are impossible, though some may be, but when it comes to classifying a garden as belonging to a certain set of like-gardens, identifying perceptualities are how we establish that belonging.
As with perhaps all aesthetic forms, the form of a garden can be considered in terms of its (formal) elements, but a garden’s elements are not the materials from which a garden is composed. Mara Miller writes:
Elements are always phenomenal, that is, perceived. The materials of the garden are the stones, rock, cement brick, water, earth, air, and vegetation of various kinds. The elements of the garden are colors, textures, shades of light and dark, fragrances, motion and stillness, various tempi and rhythms of plants or water, relative warmth and coolness (not to be called temperature, because as an element it enters the picture only when it is felt, not measured).[11]
Elsewhere, a coauthor and I describe a set of eleven categories of the formal elements of gardens, that is, elements that are perceptually available to those who attend to a particular garden and that relate together to create that garden’s unique form:[12]
- Path
- Structure
- Space
- Water
- Artifactual items
- Light
- Ecology
- Topography
- Setting
- Plant palette
- Plant character
Not every garden will include an element in every category, but in general this set of eleven categories provides an organizing structure through which to consider a garden’s perceptible form.
Let’s begin by considering three examples of garden types whose forms are strongly evident and where the gardens of these styles share certain important formal aspects.[13]
| Chahar bagh or charbagh (classic Persian and Islamic Gardens) | · square, with the square formed from quartering the circle, divided into smaller squares or in some cases rectangles (structure)
· divided into quadrants by four channels of water emanating from the center (structure and water) · in the “peak” of each corner of the overall square is a long-lived tree, with trees of average lifespan in the corners of the smaller squares (plant palette and plant character)[14] |
| Kaiyū-shiki-teien (Japanese-style[15] stroll gardens, as described by Gert Van Tonder and Michael Lyon) | · comparatively homogeneously textured materials (structure)
· lack of saturated colors and high contrast texture markings (plant palette) · low contrast objects (plant palette) · uniform surface regions with even textures to simplify the creation of boundary contours (structure and plant palette) · visual segmentation, simplified through the reduction of the number of subsegments within the interior of each object (space) · natural patterns that are often self-similar, the outcome of repeated application of the same organizing principle at multiple spatial scales (plant palette) · avoidance of duplication (plant palette) · medial axis transformation, for compact description of shape regions, and for revealing structure in empty spaces (structure and space) · structure embedded in hierarchies of trilateral junctions arranged into multiscale, dichotomously branching patterns in both visual figure and ground, with the main difference being that, while figure converges away from the viewer, the structure of ground converges in the opposite direction (structure)[16] |
| Karesansui (Japanese-style dry landscape gardens, as described in the Sakuteiki[17]) | · a variety of stones, large and small (structure)
· main stones, with “balanced heads,” set first, with supporting stones set “at the request of this first stone” (structure and space) · stones that stand upright, and stones that “recline” (structure)[18] |
Let’s now consider four examples of formal elements characteristic of the styles of particular garden designers, four who are well-known within the horticultural world and who have easily recognizable styles. Many who have only a passing knowledge of art readily recognize the work of specific artists. While other artists may have similar styles, those who know J. S. Bach may readily identify a particular work of music as his. We do the same with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Gerhard Richter, and Agnes Martin. Each has a recognizable style, as do William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Roald Dahl, and Toni Morrison. We can, of course, be wrong in an act of identification, but the possibility of error does not preclude the power of the original registration that what we are hearing, seeing, reading (and so forth) fits a pattern we have come to expect as a signature of an artist we know. Others may fit a similar pattern, and artists may deviate from established patterns, but that there is a pattern is evidenced by the readiness of our initial identification. The claim then is strengthened by those who assent when, if they know the artist too, they hear our identification. Even when the reaction is dissent, this strengthens the claim when the dissenter evidences the counterclaim with argument about the character of the pattern—were there no pattern, neither the original claimant nor the dissenter, at least presumably, would have anything to argue about.
Art historians, archivists, and appraisers rely on such patterns to establish the identities of works of art for which we have lost artist or provenance information. To tell whether a particular work is genuine, a fake, or a forgery requires those with specialized knowledge of such patterns, usually specialized not only to the artform but to a particular artist or set of artists, to carefully deduce the status of the work. Salvator Mundi, which sold in 2017 for over $450 million, was the focus of a good deal of work by many authenticators, and even now there are competing views on whether Leonardo was the sole or even the primary artist. Those who support the view that the work is an authentic and autographic work of Leonardo point to patterns of elements of this work with elements of other works that are unquestionably attributed to him.
Patterns within a body of work also can serve to bind those works into a coherent whole, creating the glue that cements each work into its place in an artist’s oeuvre. This is implied in the notion that a pattern can underwrite a particular artistic signature, since a pattern necessarily must range over some significant plurality of works to be a pattern. Artists who either create small pluralities of works or who move from one style of work to another with frequency may not, throughout their careers, have created bodies of work that would constitute oeuvres. There is nothing aesthetically wrong with this—a collection of sets likely is as good as a single set—but that artist typically will not be among those who produce an oeuvre, such as are mentioned above. Following are four examples where we associate particular forms with particular garden designers:
| Capability Brown | · one major water feature, typically a lake created to resemble a river (water)
· an architecturally distinct bridge over this water feature (artifactual elements) · huge lawns that run from the edge of the main residence (castle, manor house) to the horizon (space) · axial sightlines that end only with a work of impressive architecture – like a church or a clock tower – in an adjacent village (space) · “clumps” of trees or sometimes giant signature trees (plant palette and structure) · “ha-ha” walls (structure and space) |
| André Le Nôtre | · hyper-controlled formalism of carefully sculpted parterres surrounded by perfected manicured hedges in perfect symmetries—the parterre de broderie (structure)
· the symmetrical bosquet of trees (structure) · the symmetrical allée of trees (structure) · fantastic fountains and sculptural elements (water and artifactual elements) · axial sightlines that run to the horizon (space) |
| Roberto Burle Marx | · large swaths of the same plant, creating distinct geometric fields (plant palette)
· highlighting the character and habit of a single plant to maximum effect (plant character) · developing a sense of space through plant placement, use of color, and path (space and path) · arresting forms of water features (water) · incorporation of modernist artifactual sculptural elements (artifactual elements) |
| Piet Oudolf | · use of grasses and other perennial plants, many of which are native to the area in which they are planted (plant palette and plant character)
· plants clumped together in a kind of punctuated meadow-like expanse (plant character) · focus on the structure of the plants (structure) |
Let’s end with examples focused on considering identifying formal elements in line with the taxonomic scheme focused on a garden’s purpose(s). Let’s work from the outline of that taxonomy presented above—with the caveats that (1) what is below is a sketch and is not meant to approximate completeness, (2) the formal items mentioned here are merely typical and not at all necessary to the forms of these sorts of gardens, and (3) counterexamples of gardens that match the purpose-type but fail to possess these traits are bound to be found.
| Gardens that focus on the production of consumables | · easily navigable paths and many of them (path)
· large swaths of the same plant, typically unrepeated in the garden (plant palette) · ample spacing between plants to allow for harvesting (space) |
| Gardens that focus on the achievement of aesthetic reward | · a wide diversity of plant colors, textures, shapes, combined in ways to stimulate interest (plant palette)
· glasshouses, impressive fountains, and sculptures or sculptural forms like follies (artifactual elements and water) |
| Gardens that focus on conservation, scientific, or educational purposes | · a huge diversity of plants (plant palette)
· plants clustered together in terms of affinities that are biological, regional, climatological (plant palette) · plants typically spaced from one another to allow for individual appreciation and for scientific access (space) · signage (artifactual elements) |
| Gardens that focus on matters of identity | · elements that allow for the evocation of a memory, a culture or nation, a historical period, or a person or family, whether through the plant palette or, as is more typical, through artifactual additions (plant palette and/or artifactual elements) |
| Gardens that focus on psychological, religious, spiritual, and ritualized purposes | · paths designed to slow one’s pacing (path)
· benches to allow for contemplation (artifactual elements) · statuary (or stones in the case of karesansui) to focus one’s attention (artifactual or structural elements) |
| Gardens that principally provide venues for activities humans value | · civic gardens typically include large fields for the sake of sunning and lounging, playing games, running, and generally congregating for the sake of a communal activity like a concert (space and topography)
· setting-and-framing gardens must serve to support focus on the institution at their center, and to foster good opinion of that institution, so for instance they will have conservative designs and plant palettes and their maintenance will be impeccable (plant palette and plant character) |
Gardens are like any other aesthetic objects in the sense that each is unique, and so we cannot expect that typical illustrations of common formal features will be absolute in their application. But this is no problem, since we accept this looseness in application across the whole of aesthetics. We do not feel the need to specify in precise terms exactly what conditions must be met for a work of art, say, to be representative, expressive, or cognitively or affectively engaging. Neither do we feel the need to specify what precise perceptual features must be present for proper attribution of aesthetic properties like grace, harmony, balance, and the like. Instead, we specify the mechanism of the relation and then give examples that illustrate instances where attributions and memberships are appropriate.
In complement, there is a need for those who attribute particular (formal, that is, perceptually based) aesthetic properties to gardens to understand how to do that correctly, and in the case of garden description, this will include (1) the knowledge of a standardized horticultural vocabulary that includes terms such as ‘genius loci,’ ‘parterre de broderie,’ ‘bosquet,’ ‘allée,’ ‘ha-ha wall,’ and the like, (2) the cultural and temporal origins of these terms, and (3) the sensitivity to notice them in the contexts in which they may be expected to occur. This is the work of any aesthete, but as with so many aesthetic and art forms, in the case of garden appreciation, it comes with special requirements.
That said, it is to the perceptually available, formal features of gardens that we must turn to know if a garden fits a particular taxon or is properly a member of the set of gardens that taxon is meant to pick out. This does not reduce garden appreciation merely to appreciation of form—or, to be clearer, merely to the appreciation of what is immediately available to our senses. Appreciation or context certainly enters in, in most cases, to instances of garden appreciation. But this is not my claim. My claim is that garden classification is only worthy when once we have established a garden classifying taxonomy, we evidence how gardens are classed within that taxonomy through their forms, or more precisely through citing their perceptually available features that give rise to their formal properties, where the contours of those particular formal properties justify their membership in particular taxa.
4. Conclusion
Correctly classifying a garden is important because it allows us
- to appreciate and value a garden for what it is;
- to create maintenance agendas for gardens;
- to compare gardens to others in appropriate ways; and
- to evaluate gardens meaningfully.
We may correctly classify a garden by first deciding on an appropriate taxonomic approach and, second, by fitting gardens into their appropriate taxa. The first is achieved through justifying the organizing schema by ensuring that it significantly meets these goals, results in meaningful and satisfying garden appreciation, and is comprehensive in scope. Fitting gardens into their appropriate taxa is achieved through focus on those perceptual elements of a particular garden’s form that appropriately set its membership within a given taxon. The first task is one that requires consideration of salient contextual aspects of gardens, understanding how they relate to one another, to conditions of their coming to be, and to their material contexts such as time, place, cultural placement, religious placement, social, national, and class placements, and likely their physical contexts. Once a taxonomy that strikes the classifier as satisfactorily meeting needs is established, the focus turns from a project where context is key to one where (perceptually based) formal garden elements are key. Correct classification of gardens requires both understanding of context and of form—but it requires each at a different stage of the classificatory process.
David Fenner
dfenner@unf.edu
David Fenner is Professor of Philosophy and Art at the University of North Florida. He is the author of Plain Aesthetics (Broadview Press, 2024) and, with Ethan Fenner, co-author of The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Published August 21, 2025.
Cite this article, David Fenner, “Context and Form in Garden Classification,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to express sincere thanks to two referees for this journal.
Endnotes
[1] For definitions of gardens, see Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (New York: SUNY, 1993), 15; John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 1, 8, 14-15, 34. Miller and Hunt particularly focus on the character of design in gardens. For support of the “indissoluble amalgam” claim, see David Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48-51.
[2] Change in a garden takes place over the life of that garden, beyond the capacity of one considering the garden to capture it experientially. In calling a garden an ‘object,’ which may connote a fixed, or relatively fixed, stability, we may need to clarify that a garden is only an ‘object’ (in this sense) conceptually.
[3] Gardens are unlike the proverbial Ship of Theseus, which maintains its form while its components change. As a garden’s components change, the chances are high that its form will change as well. Too much change of components means a different garden; whether this is the case for the Ship of Theseus is a matter of philosophical debate.
[4] Jerrold Levinson, “Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited,” Philosophical Studies 38:4 (1980), 367-383.
[5] A special case are dry landscape gardens, typically composed of stones and gravels/sand, found as Japanese and Japanese-style gardens called karesansui. Other gardens that do not contain living plants likely are better thought of as art installations or as metaphorical uses of the term ‘garden.’
[6] Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 81-84.
[7] Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Abrams, 2001); Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC-2000 AD (New York: Routledge, 2004); Linda Chisholm, The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2018).
[8] Derek Plint Clifford, The History of Garden Design (London, Faber and Faber, 1962).
[9] David Fenner and Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
[10] Perhaps along the lines of the way Kendall Walton describes the evolution of artistic features. Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79:3 (1970), 334-367.
[11] Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art, 123.
[12] David Fenner and Ethan Fenner, The Art and Philosophy of the Garden.
[13] A greater level of conservativism may be observed in the evolution of garden design than in other art and aesthetic forms because gardens take such huge resources to create and maintain; garden patrons and garden designers are therefore more cautious about experimentation on large scales, and so replication of “tried and tested” garden formulas are common.
[14] Mohammadsharif Shadidi, Mohamad Reza Bemanian, Nina Almasifar, and Hanie Okhovat, “A Study on Cultural and Environmental Basics at Formal Elements of Persian Gardens (before & after Islam),” Asian Culture and History 2:2 (2010), 135-137.
[15] Kendall Brown writes that while there have been gardens in Japan for fifteen centuries, there are now far more “Japanese-style” gardens outside Japan than inside. He writes, “In the 21st century, Japanese gardens may well be considered a universal art… embraced and adapted so widely and deeply to constitute an expressive language likely meaningful everywhere and available to anyone.” Kendall Brown and David Cobb, Visionary Landscapes: Japanese Garden Design in North American (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2017), 6. For more on Japanese-style gardens, see: Kendall Brown and Melba Levick, Japanese-Style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast (New York: Rizzoli, 1999) and Kendall Brown and David Cobb, Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2013).
[16] Gert Jakobus Van Tonder and Michael Lyons, “Visual Perception in Japanese Rock Garden Design,” Axiomathes 15:3 (2005), 353, 360, 363, 366, 368, and 369. See also: Gert Jakobus Van Tonder, “Visual Geometry of Classical Japanese Gardens,” Axiomathes 32 (2022), 841-868.
[17] The Sakuteiki is highly prescriptive, offering garden planners a set of instructions that allow for little deviation and that offer reasons – largely metaphysical in character – for why such instructions should be followed.
[18] Jirō Takei and Marc Keane, Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2009), 180-183.