Sensibility of the Gardeners: The Garden of Suggestion

The artist sees how certain natural effects are obtained, distils the secret into a few basic principles, and then makes use of these principles to obtain similar effects... but not the same effects. Just as Chinese painting with its economy of line and its nervous relationship to calligraphy becomes at times almost a form of written language, so at its most extreme did the Far Eastern garden become a brief note sketched on the surface of the ground. A favourite landscape, the Western Lake, a great expanse of water spangled with islands and crossed by bridges, could be resolved within the limits of a narrow garden into a pond, an island, a pavilion and a bridge; or ultimately, into an expanse of raked sand, two rocks and a line of stepping-stones, all re-creating in the willing mind the delightful harmonies of the original, but not attempting to represent it. What, in fact, made possible this attitude to gardening was the exquisite sensibility of the gardeners who, like the calligraphers, delighted in the writing for its own sake rather than for the sake of the words. To them the rocks could never become merely symbols for islands; they always had their own beauties, their own sinuosities and bulk, their own texture and position; in the Buddhist Nirvana rocks and stones as well as men find a place if they are `right'. Stones are the backbone of the Oriental garden, not sculpted stone but natural stone, stones of all shapes, sizes and colours. It is almost true to say that stones were to the Chinese and Japanese what trees were in eighteenth-century England or flowers are at the present time. It is difficult to see why this should have become so unless it was that stones, having a permanence not affected by the seasons, appealed to a philosophy averse to change. Buddhism in India gave special emphasis to the tree in monastery gardens, because it was under a tree that the Buddha was born and later received enlightenment.