A verandah in Kyoto overlooking an expanse of white sand, its carefully raked parallel lines broken only by a few rocks; the mysterious recesses of a Chinese garden glimpsed through a circular opening in a high wall; the dried-up fountains and watercourses of a once sumptuous Mughal garden in India; a flight of terraces in Tuscany peopled by satyrs, dwarves, monkeys and gods; the surrealistic rock sculptures of Bomarzo; the throng of deities around the Fountain of Apollo at Versailles; a grotto in England with a nymph sleeping by murmuring waters; a Scottish hillside with the golden head of a Greek god half hidden in the shrubbery – these places, disparate geographically and culturally, are linked together. They are all gardens, yes, but gardens that ‘speak’ in a special way to the visitor who knows how to listen and who understands something of their language.

What is a garden of theMind?

The stock dictionary definition might be ‘a piece of land in which fruit, vegetables or flowers are planted’. But the people who dreamed up the gardens I have just mentioned would give a very different answer. To them, gardens were – or are – not merely places of beauty but places of meaning. To the modern mind the idea of gardens as conveyors of meaning is an unfamiliar one. Yet a garden can convey meaning in the same way that a building can. To visit one of the great medieval cathedrals such as Chartres is to experience not just a building but a kind of book, a text written in carved stonework and stained glass, which makes a statement about medieval theology.

Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning

Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it. Similarly, to visit, say, the garden of Versailles is to catch a glimpse of the world order as it was seen by Louis XIV and his court. In other words, a garden can be a metaphor, used to convey a world view, a mood, a thought or an ideal. A whole book – or many – could be devoted to the garden as a metaphor in literature and art. We shall of course touch on this aspect of the subject. Primarily, however, we shall focus on real gardens.

What makes gardens such potentially powerful metaphors is the way in which they bring together nature and art. This combination allows for enormous variations in emphasis, depending on how nature is viewed in particular cultures. For cultures that live inseparably from nature the concept of a garden can have no meaning, since a garden is by definition something that is set apart. For some cultures, such as those of ancient China and Japan, a garden is a refinement of nature. The modern city dweller is likely to see gardens as places where a lost natural beauty can be recreated.

Then again, a garden means one thing to a dweller in an arid desert environment and another thing to someone from a damp and verdant region. By the same token the individual motifs that appear in gardens vary greatly in the meanings attached to them – woods, for example, are traditionally sacred in northern Europe but grim and perilous places in the south (see ‘Trees, groves and woods’ below). On the other hand, there are certain motifs that appear to have a universal or widely shared meaning that crosses cultural boundaries – the fountain, with its life-giving water, is one example. Some would see these shared
symbols as belonging to the store of images inherited by all of humankind and accessible through the ‘collective unconscious’, as the psychologist C.G. Jung believed. Ultimately of course anything in a garden can take on the character of a ‘symbol’ if the observer chooses to see it that way: a bee gathering nectar from a flower, the dance of sunlight filtered through foliage, the pattern of freshly fallen autumn leaves on the ground, a spider’s web hung with dew – and an infinite number of other things. ‘Reading’ a garden is therefore no simple matter, and no garden can be seen as a text with a fixed meaning.

A garden, like a good poem, contains many levels of meaning and draws a different response from every individual. There are, however, enough shared images and symbols (either within or across cultures) to make possible the existence of a language of gardens – or rather many languages, in fact an almost infinite

The symbolic language of gardens

It would be impossible to learn all of these languages – in any case, many are lost to memory. Nevertheless it is possible to identify a common structure to these languages, which has three basic ingredients. First, there is the form of the garden as a whole. This includes the lines traced by the perimeter and the internal divisions, which can be straight or rounded, symmetrical or asymmetrical. They can incorporate significant numbers or special geometrical shapes. Compass alignments can also be important. The formal aspect would include the question of what proportion of the garden is left to nature and what proportion is shaped by human hand.

The English gardening tradition, for example, prefers to leave more to nature than the French tradition with its preference for symmetry and formality. Japanese gardens employ a sleight of hand, which creates a natural appearance that is in fact carefully contrived. Questions of form, shape and compass alignment are particularly important in gardens based on the feng shui tradition, which will be discussed in detail later. The second basic ingredient of the language consists of the objects that are created or placed in the garden or the existing landscape features to which specific meanings are attached. These might be natural or man-made hills, rivers, ponds, caves – not forgetting the animals that live in the territory or have been introduced there. Such features might also include fountains, statues, reliefs, topiary hedges,
labyrinths, pavilions and gazebos.

The third ingredient of the language relates to the plants in the garden and the meanings they are given. A plant has of course a large number of different meanings and associations depending on the region and the culture. Its meaning can be determined by physical characteristics, such as colour, shape or chemical properties. In some cases the astrological attribution is an important factor. Among the herbs, for example, rosemary corresponds to the Sun, mint to Mercury, thyme to Venus and sage to Jupiter. Then there is the whole field of religious and mythological associations. We can think, for instance, of the laurel, sacred to Apollo and symbolizing glory and poetic inspiration, the willow sacred to Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, the oak, sacred to Jupiter, and ivy and the vine, sacred to Bacchus. A more extensive list of plant meanings can be found in the appendix to this book.

These are, so to speak, the three main ‘parts of speech’ in the language of gardens. The vocabulary of that language has no end, as 4 Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning it has been reinvented many times in history and continues to be created. Nevertheless, just as the origins of many European words can be traced back thousands of years, so many of the meanings attached to garden features stem from the very earliest civilizations that are known to have created gardens. At this point it might be helpful to look at some of these recurring motifs before setting off to explore the sacred and symbolic gardens of specific regions and periods. The list of motifs that follows is not intended to be exhaustive, and the order is intuitive rather than logical, with certain motifs grouped thematically together.