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A borrowed landscape (Australia)
Holly Kerr Forsyth -- August 08, 2009 -- The Australian.news.com.au
LAST week, in the first of a month of discussion on the key elements of garden design, we reflected on the importance of honouring the landscape in which any garden is located.
We considered the centrality of genius loci. We decided that this design principle is among several that cross cultures and continents, and travel, largely unchanged, through centuries. It is an ideal confirmed by ancient and modern writings and well demonstrated by the best gardens around the world.
Among several edicts set out in Sakuteiki, written towards the end of the 11th century, the principle of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, was also crucial. Possibly the first gardening manual, Sakuteiki, was written by Tachibana-no-Toshitsuna, a member of the powerful Fujiwara family during Kyoto's Heian Period, considered the golden age for the city, when all the arts, including garden making, were honoured. During this period (781-1185) Kyoto was known as Heian-kyo, meaning the capital of peace and tranquillity.
Shakkei, which honours the relationship of the garden to its environment, and which remains crucial to the landscape aesthetic of modern Japan, is also employed in many other garden cultures. Trees on a neighbouring site might be incorporated into a smaller garden to provide a pleasing background. A garden might be planned carefully to include a distant church spire, or mountains that surround a city: each will make any garden appear larger, and more important.
The garden at Tenryu-ji temple, nestled in the foothills of the mountains on the northwestern edge of Kyoto, in the city's Arashiyama district, was built around 1256 in the more spectacular style of the Southern Song gardens of China. Later, during the Meiji period, it was converted into a Zen Buddhist monastery by the garden designer, author and scholar, Muso Soseki (1275-1351). Tenryu-ji is a paradise garden, more flamboyant than many you will find in Japan, with dry cascades and vertical rocks, representing the soaring landscapes so loved by Chinese painters. It is the borrowed scenery, appreciated best from the upper terraces of the garden, that ensures Tenryu-ji is spectacular: as the visitor climbs higher, the distant hills become an essential part of an evocative picture.
Moving west, and several centuries on, the famous trio of English landscape designers -- William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown and Humphry Repton -- swept away the formality of the previous centuries of Italian and French influence (with their message of man's supremacy over nature) to allow the landscape to dominate, apparently effortlessly. Gardens were to be a combination of classical architecture, including romantic grottos and temples that recalled ancient Greece, incorporating leafy groves and distant water: all contributed to the creation of a picturesque scene.
In this English Landscape School the boundaries between a garden and its surrounding landscape were blurred. Near the house copses of trees were arranged in formal groups on swaths of smooth lawn. Arrangements became more "natural' the further one travelled from the house: turf became rough and groups of trees more random as the eye was drawn out, into the countryside. Summer houses and pavilions would be "planted' at a distance from the house.
In the Italian landscape, the idiosyncratic conifer Cupressus sempervirens is used to frame, but also to emphasise, a distant view. In 1925, in Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) -- one of the most important designers of the 20th century -- alluded to the importance of incorporating a view into the constructed garden when he wrote, "Framed by twin cypresses that often continue to be spaced in pairs at wide intervals, the vista can carry the eye over practically unlimited distance of otherwise natural land."
You can travel to any small town perched precariously on a rocky cliffside along the Italian coast to understand the dramatic impact of the borrowed view. In the 6th century town of Ravello, located atop the steep Dragon Hill behind the Amalfi coast, south of Sorrento, the 11th century Villa Cimbrone luxuriates in its spectacular setting, looking out across the Mediterranean, toward the islands of Ischia and Capri. History, site, planting, and design all come together to create a very particular genius loci. The writer Gore Vidal described the view from Cimbrone as, "the most beautiful panorama in the world." I think you would agree.
PRUNINGS
* Spray your pansies with Yates Anti Rot if they are suffering die back or yellowing leaves. I have treated that ailing magnolia tree with the product; although not registered for all fungal diseases many gardeners find it helpful for soil borne problems.
* It's time to prepare vegie gardens for summer planting: add cow manure and compost after winter crops have been removed.
Holly Kerr Forsyth
LAST week, in the first of a month of discussion on the key elements of garden design, we reflected on the importance of honouring the landscape in which any garden is located.
We considered the centrality of genius loci. We decided that this design principle is among several that cross cultures and continents, and travel, largely unchanged, through centuries. It is an ideal confirmed by ancient and modern writings and well demonstrated by the best gardens around the world.
Among several edicts set out in Sakuteiki, written towards the end of the 11th century, the principle of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, was also crucial. Possibly the first gardening manual, Sakuteiki, was written by Tachibana-no-Toshitsuna, a member of the powerful Fujiwara family during Kyoto's Heian Period, considered the golden age for the city, when all the arts, including garden making, were honoured. During this period (781-1185) Kyoto was known as Heian-kyo, meaning the capital of peace and tranquillity.
Shakkei, which honours the relationship of the garden to its environment, and which remains crucial to the landscape aesthetic of modern Japan, is also employed in many other garden cultures. Trees on a neighbouring site might be incorporated into a smaller garden to provide a pleasing background. A garden might be planned carefully to include a distant church spire, or mountains that surround a city: each will make any garden appear larger, and more important.
The garden at Tenryu-ji temple, nestled in the foothills of the mountains on the northwestern edge of Kyoto, in the city's Arashiyama district, was built around 1256 in the more spectacular style of the Southern Song gardens of China. Later, during the Meiji period, it was converted into a Zen Buddhist monastery by the garden designer, author and scholar, Muso Soseki (1275-1351). Tenryu-ji is a paradise garden, more flamboyant than many you will find in Japan, with dry cascades and vertical rocks, representing the soaring landscapes so loved by Chinese painters. It is the borrowed scenery, appreciated best from the upper terraces of the garden, that ensures Tenryu-ji is spectacular: as the visitor climbs higher, the distant hills become an essential part of an evocative picture.
Moving west, and several centuries on, the famous trio of English landscape designers -- William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown and Humphry Repton -- swept away the formality of the previous centuries of Italian and French influence (with their message of man's supremacy over nature) to allow the landscape to dominate, apparently effortlessly. Gardens were to be a combination of classical architecture, including romantic grottos and temples that recalled ancient Greece, incorporating leafy groves and distant water: all contributed to the creation of a picturesque scene.
In this English Landscape School the boundaries between a garden and its surrounding landscape were blurred. Near the house copses of trees were arranged in formal groups on swaths of smooth lawn. Arrangements became more "natural' the further one travelled from the house: turf became rough and groups of trees more random as the eye was drawn out, into the countryside. Summer houses and pavilions would be "planted' at a distance from the house.
In the Italian landscape, the idiosyncratic conifer Cupressus sempervirens is used to frame, but also to emphasise, a distant view. In 1925, in Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) -- one of the most important designers of the 20th century -- alluded to the importance of incorporating a view into the constructed garden when he wrote, "Framed by twin cypresses that often continue to be spaced in pairs at wide intervals, the vista can carry the eye over practically unlimited distance of otherwise natural land."
You can travel to any small town perched precariously on a rocky cliffside along the Italian coast to understand the dramatic impact of the borrowed view. In the 6th century town of Ravello, located atop the steep Dragon Hill behind the Amalfi coast, south of Sorrento, the 11th century Villa Cimbrone luxuriates in its spectacular setting, looking out across the Mediterranean, toward the islands of Ischia and Capri. History, site, planting, and design all come together to create a very particular genius loci. The writer Gore Vidal described the view from Cimbrone as, "the most beautiful panorama in the world." I think you would agree.
PRUNINGS
* Spray your pansies with Yates Anti Rot if they are suffering die back or yellowing leaves. I have treated that ailing magnolia tree with the product; although not registered for all fungal diseases many gardeners find it helpful for soil borne problems.
* It's time to prepare vegie gardens for summer planting: add cow manure and compost after winter crops have been removed.
Holly Kerr Forsyth
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