Garden Replicas: The Garden of Suggestion

They have a way of making things seem precious even before they are cunningly mounted and tastefully displayed.' The plethora of buildings in the Chinese garden was the natural consequence of this passive, receptive attitude. The garden was not conceived as a place in which to take exercise; it was designed as a series of set scenes, one succeeding the other as on a landscape scroll, the transitions happily managed, no doubt, but each scene complete in itself, to be absorbed or inhaled (so much more than merely to be looked at) from one well-calculated viewpoint, sheltered from inclemencies, and itself an exquisite ingredient of the whole. The householder chose the pavilion or garden house in which he sat according to the aesthetic delight which he fancied at the moment or which nature made available. Hsi-Ma-Kuang had a Dawn-Viewing Pavilion; other spots such as his grotto were designed for torrid days; some were so placed that when the breezes stirred he could sit listening to the bamboos; some were carefully situated simply for that solitary hour in the year when the full moon should shine on the almond tree in flower. They were part of the process of squeezing the very sweetest juices out of life, a process that required the accumulated skill of the ages and the self-discipline of the quietest philosopher. It was because these gardens were in origin scaled-down replicas of some favourite natural scene that awareness of the importance of relative scale rarely deserted their makers. But it was also partly because of this scaling down that direct representation gave way to a measure of symbolism. If a hand-made hill 100 feet high is to represent a mountain 10,000 feet high, it is not long before one reaches that stage at which any lump, bump, rock or molehill can be made to ring the same bell. In fact, it is as much a mistake to imagine that these gardens were representational in the sense of being imitations as it is to conceive of any two-dimensional picture in that way.