Landscapes of the Mind

About the Topic

Gardens may first call to mind the landscapes of Jiangnan.

Perhaps you have walked through the Humble Administrator’s Garden or the Lingering Garden in Suzhou and wondered how to understand their spatial arrangements and appreciate them more closely.

As an amateur garden enthusiast, I began with these questions too.

Quxi Tower, Lingering Garden, Suzhou | Photograph by Ningrui Liu

After some reading and visits to gardens, I began to form a few ideas—and received many questions from friends.

How do Suzhou’s many gardens differ, and why can they look so similar?

How should we look at rockeries? Why do Japanese gardens resemble Chinese gardens in some ways but not others?

These questions led me to ask why people in earlier China made gardens,

how they designed them,

and why such a distinctive system developed.

Reading and field visits gradually showed me that Jiangnan gardens cannot stand for all Chinese gardens, and that today’s gardens do not fully reproduce their historical forms. I would like to share what I have learned and considered.

The first half asks what ideal worlds garden owners hoped to make. Their aspirations differed by region, period, and social position, producing very different gardens.

Understanding these imagined landscapes helps explain why scholars’ gardens sought to seem natural despite being made, while imperial gardens could suggest the compression of heaven and earth into an emperor’s domain.

Tang Yin, Dreaming of Immortals in a Thatched Hall, Ming dynasty | Freer Gallery of Art, United States

The second half considers Jiangnan private gardens, asking how ideas of retreat in landscape take form in hills, water, buildings, planting, and paths.

Rather than simply touring famous gardens through photographs, I would like us to examine clues in their design and develop an approach to looking and analysis.

These tools might help you understand even a classical Chinese garden you have never heard of before.

Hebutang and the western wooded hills, Jichang Garden, Wuxi | Photograph by Ningrui Liu

I hope this movement from ideas to forms can also help us look at gardens in Japan, Korea, Europe, and the Islamic world.

The aim is to offer methods you can use, while leaving room for interpretations beyond my own. Garden art has no single answer.