down the garden path

Builders and mechanics sometimes comment upon the plans and dictates of architects, in relation to the practical, everyday use of a structure.  >>  Reading the paragraphs below, thought Horace Walpole's comments about gardens sounded similar....where the person who lives with the garden, "sees his situation in all seasons of the year....knows where beauty will not clash with convenience..."

--------------------------- [excerpt, Waiting for the Weekend]:
All gardens are attempts to establish a happy and meaningful equilibrium between humankind and nature.  Accordng to Charles Moore, the author of The Poetics of Gardens, "in all of human history there seem to have emerged just two basic notions of how to do this." 

The first is the walled paradise garden, which keeps the outside world at bay and re-creates a perfect, orderly paradise within.  The traditional walled garden of Persia was ideally a square, divided into four quarters and further subdivided by paths and water-courses. 

From this standard, which had endless permutations possible, came the great gardens of Islamic Spain and Mogul India.  The paradise garden reoccurs in a modified but still geometric form in Renaissance Italy, and in seventeenth-century France and Holland.

The second idea, equally ancient, is of a garden ordered not according to geometry but to the natural world -- asymmetrical, crooked, diversified, picturesque.  Such gardens were seen first in China and Japan, and came into the European consciousness thanks to the English gardeners of the eighteenth century. 

They produced such masterpieces as William Kent's Rousham, begun in the 1730s.  Kent, whom Horace Walpole credited with originating the new style of garden, was also an architect, but his gardening ideas were influenced by his knowledge of painting.

A garden of his was conceived of as a carefully orchestrated series of views -- and viewing points -- not only of trees and water but of many classical objects:  gazebos, temples, bridges, and statues.  Unlike the formal garden, whose symbolic geometry could be appreciated intellectually and at a glance, the natural English garden demanded to be walked through and seen, not just once but at different times of the day and year.

Kent and his famous successors Capability Brown and Humphry Repton were professional landscape architects, but Walpole suggested that gardening was best left to amateurs, for the owner of a garden "sees his situation in all seasons of the year, at all times of the day. 

He knows where beauty will not clash with convenience, and observes in his silent walks or accidental rides a thousand hints that must escape a person who in a few days sketches out a pretty picture, but has not had leisure to examine the details and relations of every part." ------------------------------- [end excerpt]

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{Waiting for the Weekend, by Witold Rybczynski.
Copyright, 1991.  Penguin Group.  New York.}
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I like where it says the "natural English garden demanded to be walked through and seen..."  ...those bossy, "demanding" gardens....if it's not one thing, it's another....

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"The days that make us happy make us wise.
-- John Masefield

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