Artful Nature
Everyone takes pleasure in walking through nature. Gardens are our connection to Nature, whether we live in the city or in the countryside, that is according to Sir William Chambers. The only problem is, there are no professors about gardening. However gardening is in many cities cultivated and has been best improved to the human advantage.
However, Chambers establishes in his dissertation that there is little pleasure nor excitement in British gardens. He criticises, all gardens are the same and are a repetition of each other. There is a green field and to both sides a winding footpath with flower patches. One can never see something new, but the same objects from a different angle. An other extreme are the cities of verdure. These have green spaces everywhere, but everything is symmetrical aligned and no leave is out of its place. Chambers criticises both techniques. So, he introduces the Chinese gardens, as a good example of Nature and how it has been cultivated.
Chinese gardens have a higher variety of arranged nature. However, they connect their gardens with their houses, means the gardens are symmetrically designed and alined with the main lines of the facade. The architecture is connected through terranes to the garden and through artificial water-works. The key element of every garden is not plants, footpaths or water, it is intact the architecture. In order to have the house in the center of the garden, there are no plants admitted that could intercept the view of the building. Through the artful arranged Nature the gardens have a certain novelty. Gardeners have to react to the seasons, in every season there have to be the most rare and stunning plants plantet, so the patron of the garden would take great pleasure of walking in the garden. There are lots of benches around the garden, as well as shadow given by trees, which is useless to look for in British Gardens.
Whereas Britain has only kitchen gardeners, due to the little variety of the British gardens. Chinese Gardeners are very accomplished people, who not only have knowledge of plants, but are philosophers and painters too. Only arranged Nature gives a huge variety, however after time it gets boring. So it is impossible to exclude art out of a Chinese garden. There are many sculpture to be found and arranged in scenarios, that can only be seen from certain viewpoints.